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Lehman Township Supervisor Chairman David Sutton has asked the Wyoming Valley Sanitary Authority to hold off on requiring township residents to pay a new stormwater fee.
Sutton said he and other township officials want time to review how the fee was calculated and possibly come up with a different structure that is “more fair and equitable.”
Authority Executive Director James Tomaine could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday on the request.
The fee stems from the authority’s agreement to handle a federal Susquehanna River pollution-reduction requirement on behalf of 32 municipalities. It requires less sediment, nitrogen and phosphorus washed into the Chesapeake Bay over the next five years.
When township officials agreed to participate in this plan, they were led to believe most residents would be in the “tier two” category requiring them to pay $4.80 per month, Sutton said. This group is for nonabsorbent impervious areas, or IAs, ranging from 500 to 6,999 square feet.
However, Sutton said the township has been inundated with complaints from many residents that they were placed into “tier three” due to IAs of 7,000 square feet or more. The monthly fee for this group is $1.70 for each 1,000 square foot of IA.
Sutton said he’s received reports of township residential property owners receiving full-year bills for hundreds of dollars, with some approaching $1,000.
According to a letter he sent to Tomaine:
The township is the most rural municipality participating in the authority’s regional program.
Most of the residential parcels are not served by public sewer or water and have minimum 1-acre lot sizes. Many homes are in areas zoned for conservation and agriculture with at least 3-acre lots, which means they are accessed by longer driveways.
“As a result, property owners on the larger parcels are being burdened by excessive fees due primarily to the length of the drive,” he wrote. “It appears that being good stewards of the environment by encouraging large residential parcels, the cost of the program is creating an inordinate, uneven, unreasonable and excessive impact to our rural residents.”