PhillyDeals: Storm-water fees rain on a Philly success story

Rain falls on both the just and the unjust, the Christian Gospel notes.

The Philadelphia Water Department doesn't judge; it is demanding more money from all the city property owners on whom the most rain falls.

Up at 10th Street and Luzerne Avenue, Stuart Parmet and his 70 workers, mostly residents of the nearby Hunting Park neighborhood, recycle boxes from Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer Inc., and other drugmakers at the former fire-damaged SEPTA trolley barn that Parmet converted into American Box & Recycling Co. during the last decade.

It's a Philadelphia success story. But now Parmet is talking to landlords in Cinnaminson and Deptford, driven to the brink of leaving the city, he says - not by "crime, taxes, dumping, graffiti," or other urban ills, but by Philadelphia's new storm-water fees.

"They want me to pay $50,000 a year for God's water to go from my roof into the sewer," Parmet told me.

That's more than his yearly property-tax bill, and 20 times what Parmet had been paying the city for maintaining the storm sewers that drain his 200,000-square-foot plant's roof and his 13-acre truck yard under the old storm-water-fee system, which was based on how much city water each property used.

That seemed unjust; there's no obvious connection between how much water you consume and how much rainwater your property dumps into the city's storm sewers, creeks, and rivers.

And that sparked years of complaints from the Building Owners & Managers Association, which represents Center City office towers, and other buildings that use a lot of city water but aren't wide enough to drain much rainwater into the city's storm sewers.

In the 1990s, the Water Department created a Stormwater Charge Allocation Community Advisory Committee, with representatives from the University of Pennsylvania, community groups, big-building owners, big industries such as the former AlliedSignal and Conrail Inc., and parking-lot operator Joseph Zuritsky's Parkway Corp., among others.

The group's 1996 report recommended charging for storm-water drainage based on actual runoff, not city water use.

Later, the city hired an aircrew to photograph city properties, estimating building and paved areas, and assessed tens of thousands of commercial properties based on how much water they drained.

Under pressure from Environmental Protection Agency guidelines that force cities to reduce storm-runoff surge, the Water Department also agreed to ease its storm-water rates for property owners who built retention basins, used porous ground covers that let water soak through, and otherwise cut runoff.

Under the department's resulting new storm-water-fee structure, which takes effect in stages over the next four years, the owners of 273 city properties with large roofs or pavements will see their yearly bills go up at least $25,000 per year.

Properties facing the biggest increases include the city-owned Philadelphia International Airport (whose bill goes up $126,000 a month), the Franklin Mills mall, the Navy Yard and Frankford Arsenal redevelopments, the Norfolk Southern Railway Co., Cardone Industries Inc., and other sprawling industrial, warehouse, and transportation sites, says Water Department spokeswoman Joanne Dahme.

The owners of more than 40,000 vacant lots, parking lots, and other properties without water service will also start paying storm-water fees for the first time.

Some property owners will benefit from the new regime. Nearly two dozen properties - big water users with small paved areas, such as Center City offices or apartments - will see their bills cut at least $50,000 a year, according to city records.

Dahme said heavy water users with relatively compact plants, including the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Exelon Corp., Philadelphia Thermal Corp., Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Children's Hospital, Inolex Chemical Co. in South Philadelphia, and the Villages at Pine Valley, "will see their bills go down." For Penn, savings will total $11,000 a month.

Those aren't the ones complaining. It's smaller businesses such as Parmet's, where the hard pavement is needed for trucks to turn around safely, that feel the most disserved.

Arty Elgart, second-generation owner of Robert Elgart & Sons Inc. at 10th and Butler Streets, an auto-parts and chemical distributor that adjoins Parmet's plant (and buys its boxes), has joined Parmet and, both men say, dozens of other inner-city factory and warehouse owners and nonprofit groups to protest to Mayor Nutter and City Council. They've had little response so far, though Council members Jannie Blackwell and Frank Rizzo have shown interest.

The city has offered free engineering consulting to help property owners set up drainage basins, porous pavements, and other changes that could cut storm-water flows and fees.

Elgart is skeptical that those solutions are reasonable, or affordable, for built-up urban properties like his.

But "maybe they can lower our real estate tax, because they've just devalued the property," he said.