Radnor Seeks Storm Water Management Proposal

Water under the bridge? Not quite, but in a meeting that began with Board of Commissioners president Bill Spingler enumerating the township’s multiple abortive attempts to enact a comprehensive stormwater management plan, Radnor Township took a large step towards addressing its long running problem Wednesday night when it, informally, asked environmental project consultant AMEC to provide a funding proposal for the project.

"Instead of getting a hundred year flood every hundred years, we [now] get one every three, four, five years" the president said, emphasizing the growing depth of the problem, before asking attending AMEC representative Marlou Gregory to fashion a plan to pay for it.

Commissioners Elaine Schaefer and John Fisher emphasized that the AMEC proposal will be non-binding, and that the board will solicit proposals from other firms before anything is finalized.

After Ryan Cummins, a representative from Chagrin Valley Engineering, reiterated points from the stormwater management study his firm presented the township in July—the report recommended, among other programs, that Radnor better maintain existing drainage infrastructure, consider natural or "green" drainage systems, and partner with neighboring communities to control stormwater—Gregory explained via power point how the township can pay for it.

According to Gregory, the two main funding avenues available to the township are user-fee based—a dedicated payment system where residents pay an agreed-upon fee that goes directly to the project—and tax based—whereby the project would likely necessitate a tax hike, but would be paid for out of the general fund.

She explained that the tax-based plan is considered a weaker one because the general fund has so many competing claims, and these claims often eat into monies earmarked for other projects, while the user-fee system allows more budgetary certainty.

Also, according to Gregory, under a user-fee funded plan, the amount residents pay would be based on their contribution to the township’s storm water problems—as determined by their lot size, its surface characteristics, and other factors.

The user-fee based plan found a supporter in Schaefer, who praised it for the intelligent incentives it has the potential to create. The Ward 4 representative said that under a system where taxes are indexed to the amount of stormwater runoff on a particular property, "you drive people to get out of paying the fee by remediating on their own site," thus putting downward pressure on total runoff in the community.

Commissioners John Fisher and Donald Curley also endorsed a user-fee payment method, though Curley did so with the caveat that it finance a plan that is modest in scope and focused on curbing flooding, not improving water quality—what he called an "illusive" and costly target.

Ward 1 commissioner James Higgins countered that while a fee-based system sounds fair, most of the stormwater Radnor Township is flooded by doesn’t originate in Radnor

"Unless we can get cooperation from those other counties," Higgins said, mentioning Tredyffrin township by name, "we might be facing a problem without [all our] weapons at our disposal."

Other township news

Simultaneous to the stormwater meeting, the Radnor Citizens Audit Review and Financial Advisory Committee (CARFAC) held a meeting downstairs with finance director Bill White regarding the township’s five year capital plan.

"The half I was there for went well," White said of the committee's progress, adding that at the Board’s Jan. 30 fiscal meeting the group will provide an update.