The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
The township Environmental Commission wants Franklin to join the small roster of New Jersey towns that charge landowners a fee for the the amount of stormwater runoff generated on their property.
The Commission at its December 1 meting authorized Tara Kenyon, the township’s Open Space Consultant, to draw up a resolution asking the Township Council to contract for a feasibility study for what’s called a Stormwater Management Utility.
Gov. Phil Murphy in 2019 signed into law the Clean Stormwater and Flood Reduction Act, which empowered local governments to establish the utilities and charge fees. The fees can be used to pay for various green infrastructure projects that can help mitigate the effects of heavy rainstorms.
New Brunswick was the first town in the state to create such a utility. The fee varies with how much impervious surface coverage is on a property, but the average quarterly cost is about $20, according to a published report.
City officials expected the fee to raise about $1.5 million a year, according to the report.
At the environmental Commission meeting, Kenyon told commissioners that the feasibility study would be the first step toward creating the utility.
“A year ago, (state) Senator (Bob) Smith told me that there was money to fund feasibility studies,” Commissioner Robyn Suydam said. “Because they want to encourage towns to do that.”
The first thing a consultant would look at, Kenyon said, is “do you have an impervious coverage assessment? Which we do, we had one done by Rutgers through the Green Infrastructure Project we just did.”
“So, the first thing a consultant will do is look to see how large is your area, how much impervious coverage is there, and how much impervious coverage is there by land use type,” she said.
“So, residential, industrial, commercial, institutional,” she said. “They’ll kind of break that down, and then say, okay, if you were to charge whatever the going rate is, basically, this is how much you would make, but this is how much it will cost to begin it, and to operate it.”
Commissioner Stan Jaracz suggested that the township could impose a premium fee on new developments that want to exceed the maximum impervious surface coverage allowed by the township Zoning Ordinance.
Kenyon said the township would have to pay a fee to the state Treasurer, which would be 5 percent of all fees collected or $50,000, whichever is less.
The state Department of Environmental Protection, Kenyon said, “provides guidance, they provide oversight, they give technical resources.”
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