Stormwater Fee Roll Process Review Realizes Cost Savings for a County

The Whatcom County Public Works Department provides many important services, such as stormwater management, to residents. In rainy northwest Washington State, where Whatcom County is located, a well-maintained stormwater system is vital to protecting water quality and habitat. To help fund stormwater system operations and maintenance, property owners are charged a fee based on the amount of impervious surface on their property. Every year, the County calculates a new fee for each property to ensure residents are accurately charged.

Whatcom County wanted to review the processes and systems used to generate stormwater fees for the Birch Bay Watershed and Aquatic Resources Management (BBWARM) District to determine if they could be more efficient. The County also questioned whether there would be barriers to scaling up the system to apply to a larger geographic area or other stormwater districts within the county. The County asked FLO to assess the fee generation system, identify areas for improvement, and determine how a new, more efficient process could scale up.

Our assessment, based on interviews with staff and analysis of the County’s hardware and software capabilities, considered the County’s personnel resources, general process methodology, data management and processing tasks, and quality control practices. From the assessment, we developed recommendations for improvements and broke them into two phases so that they could be easily implemented without impacting the generation of the next year’s fees.

The first phase of work focused on streamlining data processing, improving documentation processes, evaluating the triggers for fee changes, developing and recording guidance for property categorization, and generating the stormwater fees to ensure that the new system was working.

During the second phase of work, we integrated a new County parcel fabric dataset, updated the processes for documentation and property re-assessment, developed additional reports, increased the use of automation tools, created a detailed quality assurance/quality control process, and implemented additional functionality into the County’s Customer Service Database.

Following this work, the County asked FLO for assistance in developing the fee roll for another stormwater district, Lake Whatcom Stormwater Utility District. FLO could apply its experience to this task and the nature of the district’s rules to increase automation in the GIS processes to calculate the fees. We also produced a customer service database to assist County office staff when responding to customer calls.

Now, Whatcom County has a more consistent and structured way to run the fee generation system and additional tools to answer customer queries about why their fee may have changed. This is of great benefit to the County; their process is now validated and faster, and the documentation and tools will simplify the process of bringing the fee generation system in-house to run to the same standard. When we compared how the County previously ran its stormwater fee roll process to how they now run it after FLO’s recommended upgrades, we found the County had cut the amount of time needed to run the process in half.