Kevin Briggs has seen his neighbors’ homes off Tanglewood Drive in St. Albans Town flood after heavy rains time and again. For years, he said, the neighborhood association has been raising funds to improve a retention pond that can help the water drain.
But Briggs, who is president of the association, would rather see the town foot the bill. “Although it’s located at Tanglewood, it’s really a St. Albans Town problem,” he said in an interview. “There’s a lot of water being brought down from all different areas.”
There is broad agreement in this Franklin County town that reducing stormwater runoff is important not just for people’s homes, but also for improving the water quality of neighboring St. Albans Bay, where toxic cyanobacteria blooms are a perennial summertime health hazard.
But there is less agreement over who should pay for a slate of infrastructure projects — including upgrades to the Tanglewood Drive retention pond — that the town must build to comply with a state-issued permit aimed at reducing runoff into Lake Champlain.
Since 2021, the town has collected about $1 million from an annual utility fee it charges local property owners that officials plan to spend on those projects. But now, the town’s selectboard is taking steps to nix the fee, arguing that the state, not local residents, should take on the lion’s share of the cost for building out the new infrastructure.
Fueling officials’ frustrations is a change to state law that, as of July, bars municipalities from charging these “stormwater utility fees” to the owners of agricultural operations. As a result, St. Albans Town is expecting to collect between $80,000 and $90,000 less from the fee this year versus last, according to Town Manager Sean Adkins.
“So it is a big hit,” Adkins said.
Selectboard members think the permit — called a Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System General Permit, or MS4 — has created an “unfunded mandate,” Adkins said. “If we were able to have a steady funding source of committed funds from the state to do this, I think it would make it a much, much easier pill to swallow for the community.”
The board met in August with officials from the state Agency of Natural Resources and called for additional state funding. Agency officials pledged to take the board members’ frustrations back to Montpelier and pointed to multiple grant funding opportunities.
But the meeting was not the first time officials have heard concerns about a lack of state funding for local MS4 projects, according to Gianna Petito, grant coordinator for clean water programs at the agency’s Department of Environmental Conservation.
“We all know that the funding we have isn’t enough to cover all of the goals of the state,” she said, noting that the MS4 program is one of a host of competing priorities for limited clean water-related state funding. “It’s a big lift for all of us collectively. We’re doing what we can, but we know it’s going to be hard for all of us to meet those goals.”
St. Albans Town is one of a dozen municipalities across Vermont where stormwater discharges are regulated under an MS4 permit, which the state issues on behalf of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The permits are tied to the EPA’s targets for reducing the amount of phosphorus that enters Lake Champlain.
To meet those federally-mandated water quality goals — and, thus, comply with the MS4 permit — state officials have identified 18 projects the town must complete over five stages by 2036. In all, the projects are slated to cost at least $3.5 million, a price tag that Adkins said is entirely the town’s responsibility, with the exception of limited grant funds.
The projects include infiltration basins, gravel wetlands and collection ponds, among others. Several are being designed, Adkins said, but none are under construction.
Members of the town’s selectboard noted over two meetings last month that construction costs for these projects have increased due to inflation since design work started.
Five other Vermont municipalities that have MS4 permits also charge stormwater utility fees, according to Petito. In St. Albans Town, owners of single-family homes pay the municipality $50 per year, while owners of properties without a single-family home are charged $50 for every 3,500 square feet that’s impervious to water, such as pavement or roofs.
Some of those municipalities, including St. Albans Town, lobbied lawmakers this year against making the change that exempts farmers from paying. That measure, in Act 42, was first proposed by the state Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, according to state Sen. Bobby Starr, D-Orleans, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee.
Starr said his committee’s goal was to prevent farmers — who are already obligated to meet state standards, known as Required Agricultural Practices, designed to mitigate the impact of farmwork on water quality — from having to fund yet more projects.
“It just wasn’t right,” Starr said, adding that farmers were essentially “having to pay twice and subsidizing homeowners who were discharging (stormwater) from their properties.”
The senator said lawmakers also commissioned a report on stormwater utility fees and he expects the issue to be taken up again in 2024.
South Burlington, another MS4-permitted municipality, also opposed the change. David Wheeler, the city’s water resources engineer, said that while South Burlington has less agricultural land than St. Albans Town, he is still worried about a shift away from an “all-in approach,” through which all users of developed land help fund MS4 projects.
“If one land use type is exempt, what’s going to stop others from trying to make the case that they should be exempt as well?” Wheeler said. “So it’s just kind of a slippery slope.”
South Burlington, he added, also feels pressure to come up with the funding it needs to complete the projects required under its MS4 permit.
“We’re certainly concerned,” Wheeler said. “Getting it all done on time — and under budget — is certainly going to be a challenge.”
At the St. Albans Town Selectboard meeting Aug. 21, members voted 3-1 to stop charging the utility fee as of July 2025. But officials later nullified the vote, according to Adkins, because the board did not follow its rules of procedure. Adkins said he expects more discussion on the issue as the town starts to draft its 2025 budget.
Town officials are also weighing the use of other funding sources for stormwater projects, such as federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars or the town’s local option tax.
But officials have also raised concerns about using taxpayer money to pay for projects in specific areas, such as one neighborhood, that don’t benefit most other residents. Briggs, of the Tanglewood neighborhood association, said its leaders planned to meet with town and state officials on Friday to discuss the best way forward.
Discussions about who should pay for new stormwater infrastructure are complicated by different land use patterns across a region, and even within individual towns, according to Elena Mihaly, vice president and director of Conservation Law Foundation Vermont.
Mihaly said the scope of improvements that need to be made is so vast that, in her view, it’s understandable the state cannot pay for it all without charging new fees or raising taxes. But she doesn’t think increasing the burden on taxpayers, especially in small, rural communities, is the best solution either.
“There are communities that have predominantly more lower-income or middle-income folks who can’t shoulder that — and it just raises real equity issues,” Mihaly said. “And then, those people are often the ones that are being hit worse by climate change.”
She said the Conservation Law Foundation is discussing ways to bring private investment from outside New England into the region to pay for climate resilient infrastructure, such as stormwater projects, hoping it can help public entities speed up the pace of work.
“It’s just a fact that when you make improvements so more water is being captured where it lands, it is not running across our landscape and bringing as many pollutants to the lake,” Mihaly said. “That’s enough for me to want to keep those projects going.”
Christy Witters, who manages the state’s MS4 permitting program, was adamant in an interview that St. Albans Town “is doing everything” right by collecting a stormwater utility fee. She and Petito said the Agency of Natural Resources is developing a new, $7.5-million grant program that would use some of the state’s American Rescue Plan Act funding specifically to help municipalities pay for MS4 projects.
Witters also pointed to Act 76 — a 2019 law that created new grant opportunities for clean water initiatives and was signed by Gov. Phil Scott at a lakeside park in St. Albans Town — as evidence of the agency’s commitment to supporting local projects.
But Brendan Deso, a member of the town’s selectboard, said in comments to her and other state officials last month that he had a different view of that day.
“I thought the cavalry had arrived,” Deso said. “The cavalry is still not here.”
