Ferguson Township to end controversial stormwater fee more than 2 years after it started

A controversial ordinance passed three years ago in Ferguson Township that established a new fee for residents to help pay stormwater management costs is going away.

In the 3-2 vote during Tuesday’s board of supervisors meeting, Matthew Heller, Lisa Strickland and Jeremie Thompson voted in favor of repealing the ordinance and its fee — something that’s been garnering public concern for years — while Omari Patterson and Patricia Stephens supported amending the ordinance instead of repealing it outright.

The fee was put into place in 2022 after an ordinance was in the works for several years in Ferguson Township. It was created with the intention of helping pay for rising management and infrastructure costs by charging landowners based on the amount of impervious surface on their property. Landowners, however, argued it created more financial burden on residents and lacked fairness.

According to the Ferguson Township website, the fee reflects the current equivalent residential unit billing system, meaning that the number of billing units for each parcel is based on the median value of impervious area for single family detached residential parcels within Ferguson Township.

In an effort to help give the ordinance more structure, the supervisors also passed a credit policy manual, an agricultural properties partial exemption, an economic hardship exemption and a fund balance limit.

But concerns about the fee have persisted since the ordinance was passed, and three residents voiced opposition to it on Tuesday night.

“The stormwater fee, as we’ve talked about in the past, is seen by property owners as a nuisance tax that affects both residential and non-residential property owners,” resident and developer Tom Songer said. “I think most people — if you polled them — would rather see a tax increase rather than have this fee.”

Dan Barker, a longtime township resident, also expressed his concerns about the fee, as well as how much it had cost to create and deliberate over it.

“I’ve been trying to say that I think (the stormwater fee) was one of those very bad decisions that was foisted onto the supervisors without them realizing what it entailed,” Barker said. “And it’s turned into a very expensive exercise in doing something that shouldn’t have been done. The recommendation that we had made — the bunch of us that had talked with the supervisors — was simply to do what Tom Songer suggested and have a minor increase in real estate taxes.”

Through the month of September, Ferguson Township solicited comments on its website for residents to express their opinions on the ordinance.

Thompson said the poll drew responses from 70 residents, with 65 of the responses expressing a “non-favorable opinion” of the stormwater fee. Of that total, 33 responses called for the repeal or elimination of the fee, with another 25 responses pointing out equity and fairness concerns.

Some of those with equity and fairness concerns felt that their properties didn’t contribute to stormwater runoff, or that they put significant investment into mitigating runoff, but did not qualify to receive any exceptions or credits.

Township Manager Centrice Martin, who, after conducting two studies on the ordinance and its complexitites with the township staff, provided the supervisors with a list of four different actions that they could take on the matter:

• Retain the ordinance and leave the fee as is
• Suspend the fee listed in the ordinance
• Repeal the ordinance as a whole
• Table the discussion and work on amending the ordinance

After presenting the options, Martin recommended the supervisors consider repealing the ordinance.

“I think that if the board wishes to keep (the ordinance), we need to simplify it, and our solicitor, who is not with us this meeting, would be able to speak more directly on that — there are amendments that we can make, but they have to be narrowly defined,” Martin said. “But simplifying it — I’m not sure if that’s where we really even need to be right now.”

Patterson and Stephens expressed an interest in amending the ordinance.

“The answer is not ‘get rid of it,’ I don’t think. But we can simplify it,” Patterson said. “So if there’s too many words, get rid of those words — start slicing and make it simple. Everybody has to pay a little something.”

But Heller, Strickland and Thompson cited the ordinance’s complexity, the high cost of the fee, concerns from the public and the potential to revisit it as reasons to repeal.

Heller painted a picture for the supervisors and residents of what life could look like for those who have to pay the fee, in addition to the other rising costs in the world.

“Residents are being squeezed — the impacts of high inflation, the high cost of groceries, were about to see an increase in garbage collection here across the Centre Region and in a few months, it’ll be tax season...” Heller said. “When you couple the squeeze that our residents are feeling with their collective voice about the stormwater fee as we’ve seen in their feedback, we have an opportunity to do something tonight that will ease their burden.”

He also shared an interest in revisiting other ideas for a new stormwater ordinance in the future, in addition to some other ideas to help recover the funds lost through the repeal of the fee.

“We need to get creative — as the saying goes ‘creativity is the mother of invention,’” Heller said. “To that point, we’ve already heard some proposals and questions to consider. What about street-sweeping credits? What about building the tax base with new-home construction and working with developers? What about lobbying our legislators in Harrisburg and bringing these issues directly to them to directly?”

Thompson said that regardless of what’s been done to address stormwater management in the past — ordinance or not — the supervisors will continue to work at an answer that fairly suits as many people as it can.

A final decision on what to do in the future about stormwater management and the offset funds was not decided upon on Tuesday, however, the supervisors will be adding a revenue diversification discussion to the township’s special budget planning meetings on both Oct. 24 and 29, both at 6 p.m.

The next Ferguson Township meeting will be at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 15.