Burlington cuts stormwater fee, shifts costs to bigger properties

Burlington homeowners will see a small break in their monthly stormwater bill, but bigger commercial and industrial properties will pick up more of the tab as the city rewrites how it pays for runoff management. The Burlington City Council voted 4-0 on June 17 to lower the residential fee from $7 to $6 starting July 1 and to move to a new system that charges non-residential parcels based on how much impervious surface they have.

The change is built around Equivalent Residential Units, or ERUs, a measure the city says uses a typical single-family home as the baseline. Burlington says one ERU equals 2,950 square feet of impervious area, measured from aerial imagery on representative properties. Under the new structure, a parcel with about 10 times the impervious surface of a house would eventually pay 10 times the base rate once the phase-in is complete.

That phase-in will not happen all at once. Non-residential owners will begin paying the new rates at one-fifth of the assessed amount on Jan. 1, 2027, giving commercial, industrial, institutional and multifamily property owners time to adjust before the full system takes hold. Property owners who want to challenge their ERU calculation can appeal by hiring a licensed land surveyor to prepare a site-specific map.

City officials have said the old flat-fee approach treated very different properties the same, even though a business with large parking lots, roofs and paved areas can send far more stormwater into the system than a typical home. The city says the new structure is meant to be fairer and to align fees more closely with runoff contribution, while also bringing Burlington in line with other similar-sized North Carolina municipalities.

The stormwater fee has been part of Burlington’s utility system since 2005, when it was adopted at $2 a month. It has since risen to $7, and the city’s fee ordinance ties the revenue to federal and state stormwater requirements under the Clean Water Act and the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, or NPDES, along with the city’s Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System obligations.

The overhaul had been under discussion for months. City materials show council first took up a stormwater fee update at a Jan. 5 work session, then set a public hearing for the revised structure in the May 5 council packet. Burlington also held a public comment session on June 16 before the final vote. Earlier concerns from smaller churches slowed the effort, underscoring how politically sensitive the fee shift had become in a city with long-running flooding and drainage problems.