# Stormwater fees in six states, as one 2020 survey recorded them

URL: https://municorn.us/data/stormwater-fee/community-fee-benchmark/
Updated: 2026-09-22
Tags: data, stormwater, rates, benchmark

> **Cite as:** Municorn.us, "Stormwater fees in six states, as one 2020 survey recorded them", https://municorn.us/data/stormwater-fee/community-fee-benchmark/ (updated 2026-09-22).
> **Licence:** CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ — reuse and redistribution are permitted with attribution to Municorn.us and a link to this URL.

What the 2020 edition of the Western Kentucky University stormwater utility survey carries for the six states this site publishes, obtained from a mirror rather than from the publisher, and the four things it does not support.

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

```survey source=wku-stormwater states=WI,TX,IN,GA,CA,MA
Counts of rows in the 2020 Western Kentucky University survey as republished by
New Jersey Future. Each count is that survey's tally of communities it heard
from, not a count of communities that have a stormwater utility.
```

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](/services/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.

_Municorn.us · https://municorn.us/data/stormwater-fee/community-fee-benchmark/ · CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ · updated 2026-09-22_

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