It's back to the drawing board on how to charge property owners for stormwater.
City council voted 27-16 against a proposed fee that would've seen those with more hard surfaces shouldering more of the cost.
Councillor Mike Layton calls the proposed framework of the fee effective and fair. "One of the most distressing pieces of all this is who is paying the most is actually people that live in apartments and condos. They pay an enormous amount more than they should."
He says there are some properties that are substantially taxing the system. "These are large parking lots, large malls surrounded by parking lots pay very little on their water bill but they cost a lot of money to manage and it's not being reflected now. That's why most cities across North America, hundreds of cities, are moving to a stormwater management fee."
Layton also argues it's more than just about money. "It would give incentives for people to, maybe, start breaking up some of the concrete that's surrounding their buildings. There are ways that property owners can actually reduce the amount of stormwater they're creating. In an era where we're having more and more frequent major weather events; more and more basements are getting flooded, roads are getting flooded. This is something that can actually make a difference."
He would've liked to see staff given a little more time to refine the plan.
Mayor John Tory says staff would have needed more than just a bit of time. "When Mike says there was a little fine tuning that needed to be done, they asked for two more years to do that work. I think, sometimes, when you're trying to unscramble an egg it's better to just say 'let's start over again with the right public policy objective."
"There were just nightmarish problems with determining whose backyard had this many paving stones and whose didn't. It would have been a very expensive thing for the city to administer," Tory says. "We're setting aside something that the report written by our professional staff said was so complicated, their report read as a reason why not to do it the way they were originally proposing to do it. For example, Mike Layton mentioned the fact that one of the groups of people that are paying too much through their water bills now when they don't contribute much to stormwater runoff were apartment tenants. The staff report said there was no way to guarantee, at all, that tenants would get the benefit of any reduced charge that might result from this new scheme."
Currently there is a charge on water bills to address the $275 million annual cost of stormwater runoff.