City Council to Vote on Stormwater Project

In Charleston, figuring out how to funnel stormwater off of area streets has always been a big concern.

Tonight the Charleston City Council will vote on a second reading of an ordinance to issue as much as $50 million in revenue bonds to fund four stormwater system improvements, including one in Forest Acres.

That project will remove the existing pump station in Forest Acres and replace it with a gravity system that uses changes in the elevation of the terrain to shift water away from roads and property and out to surrounding wetlands.

"It's a very old pump station with only a single pump," said Laura Cabiness, director of the city's Public Service Department.

"When we hired the engineers we expected to have to replace the pump, but we realized there is enough change in the terrain to allow for a gravity fed system."

Cabiness said the original pump station was never robust enough to handle the drainage for the area, and replacing it has been long overdue. The project will require the city to relocate one of its 48-inch water main lines, but the increased capacity in the stormwater system in Forest Acres should alleviate a long-time problem with flooding.

Should the Council approve the bond package, Cabiness said work on the system could begin as early as 2014 after all the final engineering studies are completed. The project is expected to take about three years to complete meaning it would come online sometime in 2016.

In addition to enlarging the system's capacity in an area proe to flooding, Cabiness said switching to a gravity fed system from a pump station will save the system money in the long run because the gravity system will require much less maintenance, and the city will not have to run power to a pump station all the time nor will it have to worry about having backup power available in case of a power outage.

The downtown projects that will also be funded by the bonds include finishing the stormwater project in the Market Street area, replacing clay pipes in Wagner Terrace and starting engineering studies on the Calhoun Street West drainage project, Cabiness said.

The bond funding formula that the city is pursuing is brand new for the stormwater system, past improvements to the system funded through bonds had been made using general obligation bonds, which required the city to use taxpayer funds as collateral.

By using a revenue bond method, the city's tax dollars are not considered, instead the revenue generated by the stormwater system itself is used as the basis for the bonds, according to the city's Chief Financial Officer Stephen Bedard.

The stormwater system has been in place long enough and has a good enough track record to secure revenue bonds just a single notch below the city's general obligation bonds from bond rating agencies, Bedard said.

Standard and Poor's gave the revenue bonds a AA+ rating; it gives the city's general obligation bonds a AAA rating. Moodys rates the stormwater system revenue bonds as AA2 while it rates the city's general obligation bonds at AA1.

Bedard said the city's water system has used revenue bonds in the past, backed up by the fees users pay the system for service. But the stormwater system is a differnet matter because it doesn't send out monthly bills, however the stormwater system does get funding from a small portion of property tax bills each year. For everyone living inside city limits 2 of the mils used to calculate thier property tax bills every year go to the stormwater system.

"That is something that has been in place for years and years," Bedard said. "There are no new taxes being added by this."

The City Council has already unanimously approved the first reading of the ordinances to approve and issue the bonds, and will be voting on both the second and third reading during the May 22 council meeting.

"We're at record low levels for interest rates, so we want to get the bonds out as soon as possible," Bedard said.