Atlanta’s Cobb County Faces Flooding, Stormwater Funding – WABE

Communities in South Georgia are cleaning up after Tropical Storm Debby. But climate change is also affecting regular rainstorms, giving them the potential to dump more water and create major problems for local governments.

Cobb County recently tabled a vote on a tax that would have helped fund repairs to aging water infrastructure. The county has been trying to deal with increased flooding and pipe failures. Despite the growing need for repairs, officials are unsure how they will pay for the maintenance of the pipes.

“We’re getting more and more complaints about flooding,” said Judy Jones, deputy water director for Cobb County.

Flooding from storm surges is a growing problem as Cobb continues to develop and climate change intensifies and makes storms wetter. Jones said Cobb residents are seeing major creeks in the county overflow into yards and roads more frequently than usual. In recent weeks, heavy rains and flash floods have inundated homes in the county.

As storms dump more rain, infrastructure designed to handle all that water is struggling to keep up with demand as pipes reach the end of their useful life.

“They’re starting to fail,” Jones said.

By October 2022, Cobb saw a backlog of 120 needed plumbing repairs, Jones said. The county had completed 80 of them — more than half of what it started. But in the meantime, 46 more had come up.

“We really need additional funding for plumbing repairs; we are not keeping up with the plumbing repairs,” Jones said.

She said the current annual stormwater budget is $8.5 million and that it cannot cover repairs to all the pipes, let alone proactive projects.

So Cobb came up with a plan to charge people based on how much their properties contribute to stormwater problems.

It’s not a new system, as other parts of metro Atlanta already generate money this way for storm infrastructure, including DeKalb and Gwinnett counties and the cities of Decatur, Roswell and Duluth.

Katherine Gurd, project administrator for the Gwinnett County Water Resources Department, said this type of fee structure, called stormwater service, has been in place there for a long time.

“Gwinnett has had a stormwater service since 2006,” Gurd said, “and since then, there has only been an increase in impervious surface area in the county.”

She said when rain falls on natural areas, such as dirt or grass, it soaks into the soil. But when rain hits hard, man-made surfaces, it can cause runoff and lead to flooding or erosion in the community.

“Every driveway, every sidewalk, every parking lot, every building constructed creates an impervious surface,” Gurd said.

Gwinnett accomplishes this by having residents pay a stormwater fee based on the square footage of impervious surface on their property.

Gurd said the stormwater utility is a steady source of revenue. As Gwinnett grows and gets more impervious surfaces, it is also getting more money to adapt to that change — for example, by maintaining pipe maintenance and assessing which pipes are likely to fail through inspections.

And she said it’s fairer because it’s tied to how much each property is contributing to the runoff.

“We’ve found that the stormwater utility fee is a much fairer way to charge our customers,” Gurd said. “You might have a very large warehouse that has a lot of impervious surface and causes a large stormwater impact on our entire infrastructure, but they might be a very low water user.”

In other places that do not use a stormwater service fee, money for this infrastructure is typically based on potable water consumption.

That includes Cobb, where opposition to the stormwater utility proposal was swift and fierce. Residents packed county commission meetings to protest, holding up signs that read “No Rain Tax.”

One resident who opposed the measure is Tracy Stevenson.

“We are not against infrastructure and stormwater improvements — we know they need to be done,” he said.

But he disagrees with the county’s approach.

He thinks Cobb could allocate more money to stormwater from the existing water system funds. He notes that right now, stormwater is just part of the overall water system in Cobb, and the rest of the system still brings in more money annually. And some of that, he said, is transferred to the general fund each year. He said he and others wonder why more of that money can’t be used within Cobb’s water department.

“Ultimately, what we want to see is a real plan,” Stevenson said.

In early July, months of back-and-forth came to an end at Cobb’s monthly commissioners meeting.

“Unfortunately, we were unable to reach an agreement,” District 4 Commissioner Monique Sheffield said, addressing Jones with the water system. “But I just wanted to publicly thank you for all the work you put into this.”

Commissioners unanimously decided to postpone the vote indefinitely — meaning the proposal is dead.

Jones clarified that if the idea were to resurface, they would have to go through months of public notices, meetings and comments again. Several commissioners noted that this isn’t the first year Cobb has tried to pass a policy like this, and they said they recognized that stormwater was an issue that needed to be addressed in Cobb.

Chairwoman Lisa Cupid alluded to the fact that the commission may see Jones again when it comes time to draft the annual budget, and that this is another way the Cobb water system could try to get more stormwater funding.

In a statement to WABE after the vote, Jones said the water system’s staff is back to the drawing board and has no plans to propose this type of stormwater service again.

Meanwhile, last month, a sudden downpour in a Cobb neighborhood clogged two large 72-inch drainage pipes with debris and caused the fronts of the pipes to give way, preventing rainwater from flowing into the stormwater system.

Thirteen homes were flooded — five of them suffered serious damage.

Cobb said in an email that emergency management and Cobb Fire worked with residents of four homes on the other side of the impacted drain pipes. With the prospect of more rain and possible road closures for pipe repairs, those neighbors were instructed to move their cars out of the cul-de-sac.