New Brunswick is NJ’s first town to set up a stormwater utilityNew Brunswick, home to Rutgers’ main campus. is the first town in NJ to set u...
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network
New Brunswick, home to Rutgers’ main campus. is the first town in NJ to set up a wastewater utility.
Editor’s note: This story was produced as part of “Stormwater Matters,” a project on stormwater management solutions by the New Jersey News Collaborative.
New Jersey’s efforts to manage increasing volumes of stormwater took an important step forward last month when New Brunswick become the first municipality to launch a “stormwater utility,” a new mechanism that allows local government to charge landowners a fee based on how much water runoff their properties produce.
More than five years after the state passed a law giving municipalities a way to pay for building so-called “green infrastructure” to absorb heavy rainstorms, New Brunswick’s City Council voted to put the utility in motion and start operation in July.
The utility will raise funds to finance those improvements by imposing an average quarterly fee of about $20 per household to fund the improvements, officials said, raising about $1.5 million a year.
Led by Mayor Jim Cahill and others, proponents argued that measures such as rain gardens and porous paving need to be taken in light of bigger, more frequent downpours coming with climate change. Otherwise , it’s runoff that goes on to pollute rivers and creeks or even homes with gasoline, fertilizer, trash and other contaminants.
On the banks of the Raritan River, New Brunswick is a logical inaugural participant. A recent study said one in seven properties in the city — home to the flagship campus of Rutgers University — are prone to flooding in the next 30 years.
Assessing a fee based on the “impervious surface” of each property, the city will have a source of dedicated revenue to build the infrastructure that will help protect them from bigger storms, officials said.
“The new stormwater utility will directly address the growing problem of runoff with an expanded physical system and a modernization plan,” said Cahill in a statement after the council approved the plan.
New Brunswick’s planned startup will come before Newark, which has approved a stormwater utility but has not yet implemented the fee because of affordability concerns, said Mayor Ras Baraka, at a recent roundtable hosted by NJ Future, a nonprofit that has been a leading advocate for stormwater utilities.
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