Beckley prepared to defend "fee"
May 24—The city of Beckley and the and the Beckley Sanitary Board are preparing to defend themselves against a lawsuit brought on by the Raleigh County Commission regarding the stormwater fee.
"The city and the sanitary board have retained some attorneys who are very familiar with this sort of litigation that involves environmental issues," said City Treasurer Billie Trump. "I think they will very vigorously defend what we've done."
In April the Beckley Common Council approved a $3.66 increase of the stormwater fee on residential properties and an additional $1.22 per one thousand square feet of impervious area.
Not long after, the commission filed its lawsuit.
However, the commission's lawsuit does not go after the fee increase but rather asserts that neither the city nor the sanitary board has a right to impose a tax on county residents who reside outside the city limits of Beckley.
While the commission's suit refers to the stormwater fee as an "illegal tax," info on the Beckley Sanitary Board website says "the stormwater utility fee is not a tax. It is a fee generated to maintain the storm sewer system and fund the NPDES permit compliance. It is user based and the fee is based on contribution to the storm sewer system."
The stormwater fee has been in place since 2007. All property owners in the Beckley watershed are responsible for paying the stormwater utility fee including county, state and federal government parcels, public institutions and commercial and industrial parcel owners, according to information on the Beckley Sanitary Board's (BSB) website.
When it was first implemented, Trump said the sanitary board "checked to make sure that they were well within previous legal precedents and state practice.
"I don't think they had recognized that there were any problems at all with the way it was done," Trump told The Register-Herald.
The money generated from the stormwater fee is used to maintain the public stormwater system.
According to information posted to the Beckley Sanitary Board (BSB) website, the increased stormwater utility fee will provide an additional $1.17 million of funding and will allow the BSB to complete at least $9 million of stormwater improvements over the next decade.
Despite a recent influx of $678 million in federal funding directly to West Virginia's cities and counties as part of the state's America Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) allotment, Trump said the city can't rely on those funds to pay for its costly stormwater improvement projects.
"Anytime there's a grant opportunity, like some of the ARPA stuff through the state, there's 55 counties and 200 cities, all asking for the same small pot of money," he said. "It's very competitive . . . and a lot of times there's matches involved."
The state has stated its intention to use these funds for drinking water, wastewater and stormwater infrastructure projects.
Trump said if the city is able to secure any of these funds "then that just extends the dollars you have on to other projects."
The Register-Herald also reached out to BSB General Manager Jeremiah Johnson for comment on the lawsuit. Johnson said he was unable to comment on any pending litigations
The lawsuit, filed in Raleigh County Circuit Court on May 16, has been assigned to Judge Darl Poling.
