Stormwater system fee increasingly likely for Murrysville property owners

For more than a dozen years, Murrysville officials were able to run the municipality without a tax hike. And even when it did take place, in 2021, it was a small bump to the earned-income and real-estate transfer taxes.

When it comes to stormwater management, that may be changing.

“Every year that goes by, the requirements from the state are catching up to us,” said Murrysville Chief Administrator Michael Nestico. “There isn’t anything specific that led to this. We’ve kind of played it slow with stormwater for a little while, and we need to fully engage with it from both a needs and a state-requirements standpoint.”

At issue is not a tax, but a potential stormwater fee assessed on all property owners in Murrysville, residential, commercial, nonprofit and otherwise. To this point, Nestico said the municipality has maintained its stormwater system primarily through the budget’s general fund. But Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection regulations for communities that have a municipal separate storm sewer system, or MS4, are outpacing the budget.

“In reality, this was an unfunded mandate from the state,” Nestico said. “They put in requirements for improvements to stormwater systems without a funding mechanism in place. We’re not scrambling to keep up, but we’re trying to stay ahead of it and address it properly.”

The fee is generally calculated based on a property’s amount of impervious surface — essentially, how much of the property is forcing stormwater to be conveyed into a collection system, rather than absorbing it directly into the ground. In addition, the fee is based on an equivalent dwelling unit, or EDU, which is the average size of a single-family Murrysville home.

“A single-family home is an EDU regardless of its square footage,” Nestico said. “And non-residential properties are assessed multiple EDUs based on their size.”

He estimated that the fee is likely to fall between $5 and $10 per month for the average residential property owner.

“Certainly this is something the community is not going to have much interest in,” he said. “We recognize it’s not going to be very welcome. But the cost of maintaining our stormwater system and its overall upkeep is also going up.”

If a municipality does charge a stormwater fee, state regulations also mandate that it be applied in an equitable way, which means the first step is conducting an aerial survey of the town to determine how much impervious surface it contains. Murrysville also must map out its stormwater conveyance system, Nestico said.

“We had an intern mapping surface-level components about five years ago, but we don’t have the underground portion fully mapped out,” he said. “That’s a big part of instituting the fee — getting the system mapped so that if we have a major rain event, public works crews can see the full network and what they may be dealing with.”

Murrysville’s neighbors in Delmont are working their way through the same issue: State-mandated pollution-reduction goals and stormwater projects are pulling too much from the borough’s general fund. Earlier this year its borough council voted to form a stormwater authority, a separate governmental body that will explore and assess its stormwater fees. Neighboring communities in Plum and Monroeville also currently assess the fees.

“This wasn’t undertaken lightly and any money that comes in has to go to stormwater,” said Murrysville Council President Dayne Dice. “It seems to me that a fee between $3 and $12 per month is a fair range.”

Councilman Carl Stepanovich was skeptical.

“I’m kind of a soft ‘no’ at this point,” he said. “I think we need some more information before we can make a decision.”

Council agreed to have staff move ahead with an aerial survey of Murrysville’s impervious surfaces.