Nobody files a stormwater fee with a regulator. There is no equivalent of the water loss audit a utility owes its state every year, so the only national record of what communities charge is a survey that asks them and prints what comes back. This page carries what one edition of one such survey recorded for the six states this site already publishes.
The survey, and which edition
Western Kentucky University runs a stormwater utility survey. Communities respond voluntarily, and the figures below are the ones the 2020 edition of that survey printed.
The bytes came from the Stormwater Utility Resource Center run by New Jersey
Future, which republishes the 2020 edition as a PDF. They did not come from
Western Kentucky University. The university’s own copy of the current edition
answers a request from this repository with an HTTP 403 and a
cf-mitigated: challenge header, while the same site’s robots.txt permits the
path, and that disagreement is recorded rather than worked around. So: 2020
figures, from a mirror, six years old at the date on this page.
That file is held by this repository, identified by hash, and every figure below is counted out of it while this page is built. None of them is typed here: the table is generated from the survey’s own appendix, row by row, and a figure written into this page by hand would stop the build rather than publish. So what is shown is a count of rows in a document anyone with this repository can recount, and not a number recalled from the document’s prose.
What the 2020 edition carries, for these six states
| State | Communities | With a fee | Median monthly fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wisconsin | 133 | 128 | $4.98 |
| Texas | 121 | 115 | $4.14 |
| Indiana | 97 | 89 | $5.00 |
| Georgia | 74 | 65 | $4.00 |
| California | 59 | 47 | $3.47 |
| Massachusetts | 17 | 15 | $5.50 |
| 6 states | 501 | 459 | — |
Generated from Western Kentucky University Stormwater Utility Survey 2020, as archived by this repository.
The difference between the two count columns is the rows with an empty fee cell, which is a blank cell in a survey table and nothing more than that.
Each median is taken over that state’s rows that carry a fee, not over every row the edition holds for it — the Californian figure is a median of the rows with a number in them, not of every Californian row. So each is a median of what responded with a figure, rather than of what a state charges. There is no six-state median in the last row because pooling six state medians would produce a figure this survey does not report and nobody measured.
What these figures are not
Not a filing
Every number above was compiled by a voluntary academic survey. No regulator collected it, no statute compelled it, and nobody audited the response. A water loss percentage elsewhere on this site is a utility’s own submission to its state under a reporting rule; this is a community answering a questionnaire from a university. They are carried on different terms and they should be read on different terms.
Not a statement that anywhere has no fee
The rows with an empty fee cell are rows with an empty fee cell. A community that has no stormwater utility at all, a community with a utility the survey never reached, and a community in the table that left the fee blank are three different situations, and the table distinguishes none of them. There is no roster of communities against which a non-response could be counted, so the size of what is missing is not known here either.
Not attached to any water system
The survey identifies a community by its name and a two-letter state code. No PWSID, no FIPS place code, no government identifier. Nothing on this page is joined to a public water system published anywhere else on this site, and a community name that matches a utility name is not evidence that they are the same body — a city, its water utility and its stormwater utility can be three separate legal entities with three different service areas.
Not a fee type
The survey’s rows carry a letter for the rate structure — E, F, T, IA, D, R and others — against a key printed in the appendix preamble of each edition. Those keys are set edition by edition and nothing guarantees that one year’s letter means what the next year’s does. Expanding a letter into a phrase would make this repository the author of the expansion, so the letters are omitted here rather than translated.
Reading this beside a rate
A fee above or below the range of state medians above is not thereby wrong, and the range is not a target. What a stormwater charge recovers varies by an order of magnitude between a program that sweeps streets and one funding capital work under a permit, and the comparison that matters to a council is against the program’s own costs rather than against a survey median from another state in another year.
The stormwater fee review works from the ordinance, the budget and the parcel data, and the exhibit on that page is labelled invented because it illustrates how a parcel record is read. The figures here are the opposite kind of thing: real, attributed, and narrower than they look.