Getting soaked by your stormwater bill? We couldn’t cut ours, but maybe you can cut yours

We’re always trying to make our business more environmentally friendly. It’s the responsible, ethical thing to do, but sometimes it saves money too. In the past we’ve looked at adding solar panels to the shop (unfortunately, too expensive to do the structural upgrades), but this month we were trying to handle our stormwater runoff. Like our foray into solar energy this didn’t work out too well, but we did learn some fascinating things about stormwater management and a way you can save money on your water bill as well…

Portland is famous for rain but the story of rainwater doesn’t end when it soaks your clothes. All that water goes somewhere. In Portland, much of it flows into a combined sewer system that carries both stormwater runoff and sewage to a wastewater treatment plant. A very heavy rainstorm can fill the combined sewers to capacity and cause some of the rain and sewage mixture to overflow to the Willamette River. But it takes a lot more rain than it once did to make that happen. Before November 1, 2011 – when the City of Portland completed a 20-year, $1.4-billion program to control combined sewer overflows – combined sewers overflowed an average of 50 times every year. Now that the west side and east side big pipes are operating, combined sewers overflow no more than four times each winter and once every three summers.

The big pipes capture and store combined sewage and eventually transport to the wastewater treatment plant. Combined sewers have overflowed only three times since Portland completed its control program in November 2011.

The combined sewer overflow control program reduced overflows, but it also contributed to increases in Portland’s sewer and stormwater rates. When the program began in 1991, the average monthly residential sewer and stormwater bill was about $14. Today it’s nearly $63. Although that makes sewer and stormwater charges in Portland among the nation’s highest, that will change. “Other cities of Portland’s size or bigger are realizing that they’ll have to upgrade their own inadequate sewer systems,” said Bob Fraley of the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services. “These are big, expensive, long term projects that they’ll have to pay for in some way and the only logical way to do it is to go to ratepayers, so those cities’ water rates will be rising to match Portland’s soon.”

We can’t reduce the amount of rainfall, but we can reduce the amount of rainwater flowing into the sewers. Rainfall captured by gutters flows to the city sewer system, but breaking this connection lets the water flow through the ground and into the river, slowing the flow and using natural processes to filter it. You may think the flow from one house isn’t enough to make a difference, and you’d be right, but when one house joins with others the cumulative effect is strong. Bob said Bureau of Environmental Services staffers once canvassed neighborhoods to encourage people to disconnect their roof drains from the combined sewer system. “So many people disconnected their downspouts that our engineers were able to reduce the size of the big pipes because the program kept so much stormwater out of the combined sewers. That a huge savings to our sewer ratepayers.”

So how does all of this save you money? When you look at your water/sewer bill, you’ll see a line for “On-site Stormwater”. Disconnecting your gutters from the city sewer system gives you a 75% discount on these on-site stormwater management charges. This isn’t a one-time deal either; it continues on as long as you manage stormwater on your property. It’s not a 100% discount because some of stormwater leaves your property and is managed by city facilities, but it still saves you some money. Environmental Services no longer actively encourages people to disconnect downspouts, but the discount is still there to take advantage of.

How did our own attempt to save money on our water/sewer bill come out? Not so well. We have four active downspouts that could theoretically be disconnected, but what then? What would happen to the water? Our shop is built out almost to the border of our property lines and the little area outside our walls is either paved or covered with packed earth and gravel. If we disconnected our downspouts there wouldn’t be anywhere for the water to soak into the ground. It would either flow onto the streets and into the city sewer (no savings there) or down the hill and onto the Springwater Trail (no savings there either). So, while we couldn’t make the changes we hoped for, maybe it’s not too late to make a difference. If this article prompts you to disconnect from the city system then we’ll know we made our city a little better and saved you a couple dollars, which wouldn’t be a bad ending to the story at all.