Another prominent voice is calling for stormwater fees to reduce the flooding that has plagued Hamilton and other cities. Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner Dianne Saxe also wants full protection of “green infrastructure” such as remaining wetlands and woodlands, but her watchdog office is now on the chopping block of the Doug Ford administration.
Both recommendations in Saxe’s annual report on environmental protection are specifically applicable to Hamilton and will certainly confront the new council being sworn in early next month. Stormwater fees have been proposed by city staff more than once, only to be turned down by a divided council. And despite repeated flooding, the pressure on the city is constant to convert more wetlands and other greenfield lands to new residential or commercial development.
City staff argue that Hamilton’s practice of using water rates to pay for rapidly growing stormwater management costs is not appropriate because it lets off the hook the large commercial and private parking lots that generate much of the runoff in major rain storms. The size of those impervious areas has no relationship to water rates, and the owners of some of these areas don’t pay any water rates at all.
A growing number of Ontario municipalities, including Mississauga and Kitchener-Waterloo, pay for stormwater management with impervious surface fees that reflect actual amounts of runoff generated by individual properties. KW applies the fees to individual homes but gives rebates for conservation measures such as rainbarrels, disconnected downspouts and permeable driveways that reduce runoff.
Saxe pointed to 44 Ontario municipalities including Hamilton that in heavy rains “still overflow their combined sewers and spill filthy, bacteria-laden sewage into lakes and rivers – 766 times last year alone”. She argued municipalities could tackle this problem with stormwater fees and green infrastructure. The overflows almost always occur during heavy rains when stormwater flows combine with raw sewage to overwhelm municipal treatment facilities.
“The government still allows an astonishing amount of pollution to pour into our lakes and rivers,” declared Saxe at her media conference last week. “The Ontario government has known about this for decades, but has consistently chosen not to regulate these pollutants effectively.”
In addition to financially penalizing parking lots and other impervious surfaces, Saxe argues that municipalities must protect remaining natural areas that help control runoff. In her early October report on climate change, she noted that “in these natural areas, on average, only 10 percent of total rainfall becomes runoff” while more than half ends up as stormwater flows in highly urbanized areas.
In her latest report, Saxe pointed to the loss of 15,000 acres of wetlands in the first decade of this century alone, and accused governments of failing to protect remaining ones by not dealing with a “260-year backlog” in evaluating wetland significance.
“An Ontario wetland receives little or no protection until the government has gotten around to officially identifying it as ‘provincially significant’,” notes Saxe. “All remaining wetlands should be protected – presumed significant – until proven otherwise. And then the protection should be real.”
Two days after Saxe’s latest report, the new provincial government announced it was eliminating her independent watchdog office. It’s not clear if that move is tied to Saxe’s blistering critique of the province’s failure to ensure clean water or her detailed dissection last month of the benefits of the cap and trade climate action program cancelled by the Ford government.
It’s not even clear exactly what the Ford government will do to shutdown Saxe who reports directly to the legislature, not the premier, but it appears the intention is to slash the budget of her office.