Alexandria Sheriff Joins Outraged Chorus, City Council Defers Plan to Double Stormwater Utility Fees

Alexandria Sheriff Dana Lawhorne joined his neighbors in criticizing City Council’s plan to double the stormwater utility fee, and asked at last night’s meeting that the matter be deferred to give the community more time.

Lawhorne, who lives in Del Ray, said that his home flooded multiple times last year and is frustrated with what he called a lack of progress to solve the problem. A number of heavy rainstorms in 2020 resulted in dangerous flooding situations, revealing a besieged stormwater management system that left many homes damaged throughout the city. There were more than 500 requests for service through the City’s 311 system due to extreme rain events this year, according to a city memo.

“When the city imposed a stormwater utility fee in 2018, I thought it was a step in the right direction,” Lawhorne said. “Instead, this is what happened in 2019 only 12% of the capital expenditures went to addressing the street flooding, and only 28% and 2020. Most of it went to the mandated Clean Water Act initiatives. I’m all for the clean water, but I thought we would get a fair share of that pie, but we didn’t.”

City Council ended up passing a motion by member Amy Jackson 6-1 to reintroduce the city’s stormwater utility fee on Jan. 26, followed by a public hearing next month. Mayor Justin Wilson was the lone dissenting vote.

“I do feel like this has been rushed through,” Jackson said.

Yon Lambert, the director of the city’s Department of Transportation and Environmental Services, worked with the newly formed Interdepartmental Flooding Management Task Force to create the plan over the last six weeks. The plan includes doubling the $140 annual fee for residents to generate $15 million per year on $284 million worth of projects that would not be completed until at least 2030.

“These are very very complicated infrastructure projects,” Lambert said. “Some of them may require property acquisition. There are going to be situations where we’re going to have to be considering utility relocations. All of those things add up to some level of uncertainty for us as we move forward, but it is our desire to continue as we refine the design of the project, the scope of each project and continue to come back to you and talk to you more clearly about what the delivery will be.”

City Councilman John Taylor Chapman agreed with Lawhorne’s assessment.

“I really think there’s been overall a kind of genuine miscommunication around what we’ve been spending out money on, versus the expectations of the public,” Chapman said. “And maybe that just has not been followed and communicated out… The city has not necessarily prepared itself to try to catch up to the inland flooding.”

Slides from the city’s presentation are below.

Graphs via City of Alexandria