Flooding problems led to pioneering storm-water utility

Uncontrolled storm water can be hazardous and can cause major damage; it sometimes can even endanger the lives of children.

In June 1967, firefighters rescued two grade-school boys who lived on Garth Avenue, Dicky Stone and Shaun Herbold, from a drainpipe near their home. The boys, with their buddy Steve Lampone keeping watch, thought it would be fun to climb into the drain. They got a lot more than they bargained for when what began as a light rain suddenly turned into a downpour. Steve ran for help, and Shaun’s teenage sister called the fire department. The boys rode the current through the drainpipe to a ditch on the west side of Garth Avenue, shaken and scratched but otherwise uninjured.

On another occasion, a boy washed all the way from north-central Columbia through enclosed culverts and pipes until he emerged, alive, in the open Flat Branch Creek south of Broadway. Another young man, 12-year-old Bryan Lee Gaither, was not so lucky; he died when he was swept into an uncovered drainage culvert at the intersection of Donnelly and Cook avenues.

While not always life-threatening, flooding from storm water regularly causes property damage to homes, businesses and other structures. I recall seeing the entire east side of a garage washed out, and sometimes I saw beds floating in basements. Storm water can render streets impassable to emergency vehicles and can cause problems with sanitary sewers, and there are always environmental concerns about runoff into our creeks and other bodies of water. Columbia has made a great effort over the years to correct and avoid storm-water problems as new development sprouts on the fringes of the city.

Historically, storm water has been a problem for cities, and Columbia is no exception. Our city has had its share of storm-water problems, as indicated in professionally prepared reports and telephone calls to City Hall and to the homes of city officials— including my own. People seldom pay attention to storm water until something bad happens, and that usually occurs during heavy rains.

In the past, flooding in Columbia homes often has been caused by improperly constructed or maintained swales, which are the indentations in the ground between or behind houses that carry water away. Foundations set too low also create home flooding problems. Open ditches were sometimes replaced with pipe. It used to be that residents would buy the pipe, and the city’s street division would bury it for them. The problem with that system was that people wouldn’t buy the right size pipe for the job, or they wouldn’t install a swale above the pipe to carry away water during extremely heavy rains.

Like most infrastructure issues, my main “theme” was to “stop the bleeding” from problems caused by previous poor construction, to implement better standards for new construction, and to find ways to correct bad pre-existing conditions. Discussions in the early 1960s helped stress the importance of better subdivision standards to control storm water and avoid creating new problems. The Storm Drainage Standards ordinance of 1969 changed the rules so that the city and developers could install only pipe that was properly sized in new subdivisions and streets that were under construction.

In partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Columbia launched a study of nearby flood plain issues in 1968 and in the early 1970s implemented a flood plain ordinance to ensure that homes were not constructed in flood-prone areas.

All property contributes to stormwater runoff: roofs, parking lots, driveways and yards. I found it hard to explain this concept when I recommended to the Columbia City Council that we form a storm sewer district in a drainage area and issue tax bills to pay for improvements as allowed under state statutes and the city charter. This solution could have been one good answer to neighborhood storm-water problems because the city was budgeting only a little more than $100,000 per year for all storm-water work, including cleaning and maintenance of existing street inlets and piping.

Although this approach was being used successfully for street reconstruction and sanitary sewer work, property owners loudly objected. And those objecting the loudest were usually those at the top of the hill who saw no need to help pay for problems that were affecting only their downstream neighbors. Lack of funding meant the storm sewer district work could not be done, and problems could not be solved.

Complaints about local flooding after heavy rains continued to come in increasing numbers, and the city began to look for more comprehensive answers to the problems. There was an unusually high amount of rainfall in the early 1980s.
In 1981, engineering consultant Larkin Associates presented the first professional storm-water report to the city as part of the effort to get a Federal Community Development Block Grant. The report studied stormwater issues in a federally defined Community Development Block Grant area in central Columbia.

Major progress came after the city hired engineering consultant Black and Veatch in January 1982, at a cost of $150,000, to prepare the city’s first comprehensive storm-water management plan, which the firm submitted to the city in March 1983. The report addressed known and potential problem areas within the city’s 10 drainage basins, recommended solutions and estimated correction costs as high as $17 million.

The city was not the only body to show concern. In 1983, Boone County formed its own Storm Water Runoff Committee, at the direction of the County Court, to study similar issues outside the city limits.

The report recommended that the city establish a storm-water utility to address the problems, allocate $3.9 million to alleviate them, and fund it with a monthly utility fee of $1.95 for residential customers and a fee of 4 cents per 100 square feet of impervious surface area for all other properties. Although the idea was new to Missouri, at least 10 other U.S. cities, including Denver, Detroit and Portland, had formed storm-water utilities, and there appeared to be no legal impediment in Missouri to using the innovative concept. I recall discussing the 300-page report at the 1983 council retreat; not all council members were in favor of the concept during the discussion.

The city council appointed a Stormwater Management Task Force, chaired by Marty Riback, which presented its report on Dec. 3, 1984. George Montgomery, chief engineer in the city Public Works Department, and I, as director of the department, provided staff support to the committee. The report prioritized the necessary projects and suggested using revenue bonds to fund the projects, retiring the bonds with monthly utility charges, and enacting ordinances to prevent new problems. Two years later, the task force submitted its final recommendations, which included a new storm drainage design manual, a draft storm-water detention ordinance, an ordinance to require storm-water control facilities, a request for a storm-water utility fee and the adoption of stormwater policies and procedures. Sue Hege chaired the subcommittee on policies and procedures, and many other people were involved in the process.

Passing a fee would be a political challenge. “We know we are going to have to spend money, but there are 40 people living on top of the hill and two people living on the bottom of the hill, and how are we going to get this to pass?” John Jones, a member of the committee, was quoted as saying in the November 13, 1984, issue of the Columbia Missourian.
At that time, the proposed detention ordinance was not adopted in all zoning districts, the storm-water control facilities were only implemented in planned development ordinances, and the fee was not placed before voters because of other infrastructure concerns and ballot issues. Columbia Mall became the first development to provide storm-water detention.

As the 1980s came to a close, the effects of new development had become a concern in the community, and federal regulations to implement storm-water provisions of the Clean Water Act were under review. Months of discussions between the development community and city staff brought about a consensus that funding would need to come from a combination of development fees and monthly fees that a stormwater utility would charge for ongoing construction, maintenance and long-range planning.

In July 1991, the city passed a comprehensive Land Preservation Act, which dealt with storm-water issues related to development. The ordinance requires a land disturbance permit on sites two acres or larger, and submitting an erosion control plan and a storm-water management plan are required to get that permit. Sites larger than five acres must include storm-water detention facilities.

A decade after the Black and Veatch report, the City Council passed an ordinance on Feb. 1, 1993, calling for an April election to authorize a storm-water development charge on new construction and to issue $5.3 million in storm-water management system revenue bonds to be repaid by storm-water utility charges on monthly utility bills. At the time, the city council consisted of

Mayor Mary Ann McCollum, Larry Schuster, Chris Janku, Bob Hutton, Rex Campbell, Karl Kruse and Matt Harline. Lowell Patterson was Public Works director, and I was city manager. Mayor McCollum appointed a ballot issue committee to educate the public and raise funds to promote the issues involved with a stormwater utility. She asked for my help in forming the committee. I remember calling Bo Fraser, CEO of Boone County National Bank, who had assisted the city on many important initiatives, asking him to be on the committee, and I recall him saying, “Beck, I might help you raise funds and educate the public, but just what is a stormwater utility?”

Even though others probably had the same question in their heads, the ballot issue passed on April 6. The new four-tiered system of charges began Oct. 1: 65 cents, 85 cents, $1.15 or $1.35 a month for residential units depending on the size of the home and $4 a month for non-residential accounts.

Typically, a utility has a designated source of revenue to finance construction and maintenance of its facility. Prior to the ballot issue proposal, the council had in fact established a storm-water utility in the budget I submitted in 1990. Because Finance Director Harold Boldt told me I had to provide a funding source if we were to establish a new utility, I took the funds from the previous street and storm sewer budgets equal to the amount that had been used for storm-water work in the past as our designated funding source. With the adoption of the budget, the storm-water utility was born.

The utility built its first detention reservoir at the Again Street Park in north-central Columbia at the headwaters of the County House Branch, which reduced downstream flooding in the County House drainage area. State grants to build such facilities were available to local governments that had 50 percent matching funds; our matching funds came from the city utility, which was important for getting priority projects under way. The formation of the utility and the passage of the ballot issue solved most stormwater problems as defined by the committee.

Today storm water remains newsworthy as our city continues to grow. In March 2007 the city council approved new storm-water rules designed to establish best-management practices and define measurable goals to meet EPA and state guidelines for storm-water regulations, and the new rules went into effect last fall. Also, the council authorized the consulting firm CH2M Hill to make a current assessment of our stormwater design manual, assess program needs and evaluate the existing storm-water utility rate structure. The city council and the community will soon discuss this new report.

Storm-water issues are community problems that affect everyone. Solutions must be community- wide and comprehensive to fully address the issues. While other cities and towns have struggled with how best to handle storm water, Columbia chose to address it in an unusual and ultimately highly successful way by creating the state’s first storm-water utility. As the committee’s priority projects were completed, and as new standards were implemented, City Hall is receiving fewer calls. Our city will continue to benefit from this cost-effective approach to handling storm-water issues in the future.