Clean Water in the News

A proposed storm-water ordinance unveiled by city of Winston-Salem officials last night would increase the requirements for controlling runoff to reduce water pollution and flooding, and impose steep fines on developers who fail to follow management plans for their sites.

It requires that developers and homeowners associations of new projects put money aside to maintain retention ponds and other structures, and it creates a storm-water appeals board to review decisions by the city’s storm-water director.

The new plan was reviewed by the public-works committee of the Winston-Salem City Council. The committee will consider the proposed ordinance again at its March 18 meeting.

The new plan comes six months after the public-works committee postponed action on an earlier version of the rules in an effort to gain the support of city officials, business groups and neighborhood advocates.

The current storm-water ordinance had to be reworked to make sure that the city complies with state and federal rules requiring that runoff be controlled to remove silt and other pollutants to improve water quality.

However, the proposed ordinance also contains rules for managing water quantity, provisions that aren’t required by the state or federal government.

Runoff has long been a concern of city-council members, who frequently hear complaints from residents about flooding when it rains.

Runoff is also an expensive problem. Last year, the council approved having the city pay 70 percent of the cost of storm-water-control improvements on private property. The council has also discussed taking part in a federal buyout program of flood-prone properties, which would require local matching money.

Greg Turner, the assistant city manager in charge of public works, began the discussion by summarizing the ordinance’s major components and pointing out changes to the proposed plan made by staff since last fall.

The plan requires developers to design storm-water control systems that are able to handle runoff from storms so big that they occur on average only every 25 years. The current standard is a 10-year storm.

The new proposed ordinance sets a civil penalty of $1,000 for violations, and allows city officials to issue stop-work orders until compliance problems are fixed.

The new plan also allows developers to submit project proposals based on the “old” storm-water rules for up to four months after the new ordinance is approved.

Turner said that allowing projects to be grandfathered in under the old rules gives builders time to make the transition.

After the overview, the committees then took comments from the crowd of more than 35 people attending the hearing.

Builders and real-estate agents said that the 25-year standard is too strict and would make new houses unaffordable. They also called for the city to take over maintenance of any storm-water retention ponds, saying that homeowners associations couldn’t handle the job.

“It’s really shortsighted to think that a homeowners association will be able to deal with this,” said Grover Shugart, an area developer.

However, neighborhood advocates said that the 25-year design standard was needed to prevent future flooding problems and that the builders’ request that city money be used to maintain the ponds was simply a way to get taxpayers to subsidize the cost of private development.