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Health & Fitness

Stormwater Fee...An Unfunded Politically Unpopular Mandate - Let the Feds Sue

The Stormwater Fee is a politically unpopular un-funded mandate that's been kicked down all levels of government to the municipality. Counties shouldn't impose the fee at this time.

I have been thinking that the Storm Water fee that has recently been introduced is nothing more than an unfunded Federal mandate that has been passed down to the State level and the State has passed onto the municipalities completely un-funded. This move has been done because the fees that are going to be imposed are politically unpopular and to insulate the political fallout to only the politicians in lower level municipal positions rather than themselves. This leads to each county imposing a fee that the legislative body in that particular county decides upon. There will be no state or federal uniform fees and each county will have a different formulation for the amount of fees each property owner will pay to theoretically conform to federal standards. I am not a lawyer but I believe that this unfunded mandate for states (and ultimately municipalities) being required to conform to theoretical environmental benchmarks makes me think that there must be legal grounds for a lawsuit, especially since there is no uniform formulation for how much runoff comes from which source or type of property and the true cost of removing and cleaning it. If I were the county executives and mayor, I would be working on a legal game plan to either send this mandate back to the state level or allow the Federal government to take legal action against the state…and the state to in-turn take legal action against the counties, which would at least postpone the fee from taking effect, possibly for years. Let me know what you think…

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