Equitable stormwater utility fees: an integrated analysis of environmental, socioeconomic and infrastructure factors at the community scale

Abstract

Abstract Municipalities worldwide implement stormwater management programs to mitigate the hydrological and water quality impacts of stormwater runoff. Stormwater utility fees (SWUF) are often used to fund such important programs by collecting revenue from residential and commercial properties. However, existing SWUFs often solely rely on the estimate of impervious surfaces and do not consider other environmental, infrastructure, and socioeconomic factors in the generation and effects of stormwater runoff. This study is the first attempt to propose a reconstruction of SWUFs from the perspectives of social equity and environmental justice. The method aims to address disparities in fee rates among residential parcels, focusing on helping economically disadvantaged communities. It integrates drainage service, potential contribution to non-point source pollution, and socioeconomic status through two alternative schemes. The two schemes allocate fees based on combined rankings of the three factors at the level of census block groups. The proposed method was applied to 88 180 residential parcels in Corpus Christi, Texas, a mid-sized coastal community. The results suggest that over 70% of the disadvantaged communities would benefit from the reconstructed SWUFs without affecting the targeted funding for stormwater infrastructure. This method builds on publicly available datasets and offers an adaptive framework for other municipalities to incorporate additional factors or datasets, representing an exploratory step toward achieving more equitable stormwater management practices.