Former El Paso Mayor Susie Azar has watched the unfolding controversy over the stormwater utility closely because she was mayor the first time it came up.

Then, the proposal by city staff to finance a stormwater utility under the Public Service Board was dubbed the “rain water tax,” and it led to Azar’s defeat in 1991 along with city representatives Mateele Rittgers and David Chew.
Chew, now a judge on the state’s Eighth Court of Appeals in El Paso, vividly remembers who asked the question that turned a wonky discussion about a drainage plan into a political cloudburst that washed away three political careers and ended the city’s first environmentally minded administration.

The city’s chief administrative officer, Kenneth Beasley, and Public Works Director David Harned – both deceased – were briefing the council for the last time about a proposal to establish and fund a stormwater utility under the PSB.

“It was one of my ill-advised questions when I knew the answer and should have kept quiet,” Chew said. “The city was proposing it for the same reason as this one, to take care of the runoff. It was a federal mandate, as I recall.

“It didn’t seem anyone was there, and I posed the question to one of them, ‘Isn’t this, in effect, a tax on rain?’ They kind of looked at each other and one of them said, ‘Yes, I guess that’s what it is.’ ”

“By the 6 o’clock news, it was ‘City Council considering rain water tax,’ and bingo. That was like two weeks before the election.”

In that spring election, Chew came up two votes shy of winning a four-way race outright. A month later, he lost the runoff to Chuy Terrazas.

“With two-year terms, you have a few big issues that people get excited about, and that definitely was one,” said Azar, the city’s first and only woman mayor. “I certainly thought it was a major part of my demise.

“The proposed storm water fees were to fund a study of what would be needed. … We just discussed it, and everybody got so bent over sideways that we never even voted on it. It was just abandoned because there was such a public outcry.”

But the lesson she said she took from public reaction and the ensuing election campaign over the so-called rain water tax was a hard one.

“I guess the lesson that I learned was that El Pasoans don’t want to spend a penny until they have to,” she said. “Unfortunately, if they had planned ahead, they wouldn’t have spent as much money as we are now.

“Too few people are willing to do preventative maintenance. They just want to fix it after it breaks. People in El Paso hate taxes.”

But, she said, the city needs a plan and a stormwater utility.

“We can’t lose millions of dollars and possibly lives to floods,” she said. “I mean that’s irresponsible. We’ve got to bite the bullet someday and be a responsible government and be a responsible population.”

Elected mayor in 1989 by a landslide after three terms as the West Central city representative, Azar remembers City Council being warned by Beasley and Harned that the city was in violation of the Clean Water Act because it had no stormwater management plan.

After Bill Tilney ousted her, the issue of a stormwater utility didn't float again until 2006.

“Tilney just didn’t touch that thing with a 10-foot pole and, as a matter of fact, never even let the study that he was responsible to do out for bid,” Azar said.

Tilney could not be reached for comment.

A search of the minutes of City Council meetings for late 1990 through 1991 turned up only two references to the stormwater issue, one of which was the adoption of an ordinance in August 1991 regulating the discharge of pollution from industries and other businesses into the city’s stormwater system.

Harned and Beasley had advised the city that the EPA was requiring every city to implement a plan to prevent any stormwater from reaching streams, rivers or lakes without being cleaned up.

“From my conversations with Dr. Beasley, the city pretty much put the stormwater issue away and ignored EPA,” Chew said, referring to what happened after the 1991 election. “Every time the EPA would call up and say ‘What are you doing on this?’ they would just avoid the issue. Establishing he utility was a no-no and would not see the light of day.”

That was an enormous order and, City Attorney Charles McNabb said, the rules were later relaxed.

“The necessity for cities to comply today is a little different that it was back then,” McNabb said. “Some recognize that you can’t necessarily come into compliance with a number of federal laws because it is physically impossible to do it.”

The city in 1998 adopted rules that, among other things, required jean washing plants and car washes recycle their water and clean it up before discharging it into the city’s sewer system.

Rittgers, who served one term as the Eastside representative from 1989 to 1991, was defeated by Joe Pickett, who served several terms before going on to the Texas House of Representatives.

He remembers hearing about the rain water tax late on the day it came up at the City Council meeting and going straight to a radio station.

“I did a commercial saying, ‘Can you believe your City Council person wants to tax you on how much it rains?’ ” he said. “The council never voted on it. I don’t think they came close to passing it.

"Later, someone in the city came back and said, ‘We don’t believe this is a federal program that’s going to be implemented.’ ”

Rittgers said she thinks Azar made the mistake of not coming out quickly with an explanation telling people what the proposal was really all about, and that it wasn’t a rain tax.

She thinks El Paso would have fared much better in Storm 2006 if city government had established a stormwater utility to maintain and improve the system while requiring developers to come up with adequate drainage plans.

The proposed fees, she recalled, were in the pennies for PSB’s residential customers, far less than the original plan for the current stormwater utility.

The PSB developed a rate schedule that imposed fees of thousands of dollars on businesses and schools that, Rittgers said, was “ill-conceived.”

“You cannot levy those kinds of fees on people,” she said. “You’ve got to come up with a more reasonable plan and spread it out over a longer period of time. It was not well thought out.

“We have had too many increases in other utilities. People can’t handle this, and I’m not surprised at all that they are upset about it.”

The lack of maintenance and consistent improvements in stormwater drainage systems has been a big problem in many cities, she said.

“But if they’re going to do it today,” she said, “they need to spread the cost out over more time.”