Cincinnati's Stormwater Management Utility (SMU) will become a standalone agency, separate from its current position as a division of Greater Cincinnati Water Works (GCWW).
City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to approve Mayor Aftab Pureval's motion directing city administration to take that action by the start of 2027.
"Both structurally and from a budget perspective, this department has not been supported by City Hall as a whole for several years and several administrations," Pureval said, adding this step is part of broader efforts to respond to significant flash flooding this summer.
The motion directs city administration to establish SMU as a standalone agency "with responsibility for leading, coordinating, and executing the City's stormwater management, stormwater infrastructure, flood protection, stormwater compliance, and stormwater resilience functions."
The agency will report to the city manager. The motion also asks the administration to conduct a review of stormwater related "activities, responsibilities, personnel, funding, and services" that exist in other city departments and agencies and could instead move under SMU.
Jason Fleming has been leading SMU as part of GCWW, and will now lead the effort to make the changes.
"Stormwater and localized overland flooding has become a more prevalent issue that we need to deal with," Fleming told WVXU. "I think raising the awareness and the accountability and the resources that are needed to deal with it to a higher level is something that the city will benefit from."
Learn more below; click to jump to a specific topic:
- What is the Stormwater Management Utility?
- What does MSD do for stormwater management?
- Learn more about Cincinnati's sewer system
- Q&A with SMU Director Jason Fleming
What is the Stormwater Management Utility?
SMU is currently a division of Greater Cincinnati Water Works, the drinking water utility. It manages:
- 300+ miles of storm sewers
- ~30,500 inlet and intake structures
- 6,000+ storm sewer manholes
- The Mill Creek Barrier Dam
- Four pump stations
SMU is funded by an "equitable storm drainage service charge" collected from property owners, except for undeveloped land and street rights-of-way.
According to the city's website, the charges depend on the type and size of the property:
- One and two-family residential properties that are 10,000 square feet or less pay $9.04 a month.
- One and two-family residential properties that are more than 10,000 square feet pay $12.66.
- All other properties pay a variable charge based on a formula that includes the lot size and an "intensity development factor" related to the amount of impervious surface on the property. In other words, a property that is mostly grass with a small shed will pay less than a fully-paved lot.
The Cincinnati Stormwater Management Utility has been a division of Water Works since 2016. Before that, it was part of the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati (MSD). Although MSD is a wastewater utility, parts of the system also take in a significant amount of stormwater runoff.
Revenues from these fees are placed in a restricted fund, meaning the money can only be spent on stormwater management — it cannot be transferred to the General Fund to be spent on another purpose.
This funding is separate from the proposed impervious surface fee for the Metropolitan Sewer District, which Hamilton County Commissioners are considering.
According to city budget documents, SMU brings in about $31 million in revenue per year.
The current budget, which City Council approved in June, also includes $115,000 "to fund a cost of service study for a future stormwater rate increase to allow the city to fund drainage projects that improve the reliable performance of the stormwater collection system."
What does MSD do for stormwater management?
MSD is the sanitary sewer utility for most of Hamilton County. Sanitary sewer services refer to what goes down the drain or is flushed down the toilet.
For most of Hamilton County, sanitary sewers are separate from stormwater sewers. Most of Cincinnati, however, has a combined sewer system, meaning sanitary and stormwater sewage share the same pipes.
During heavy rain, stormwater can overwhelm the combined sewer system. When that happens, the combination of untreated human waste and storm runoff can overflow into public waterways like the Mill Creek and Ohio River. This is called a Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO).
Heavy rain can also cause a sewer backup (SBU), where a combination of untreated human waste and storm runoff can be pushed back through a home's plumbing and into basement floor drains, toilets and sinks.
MSD is under a federal consent decree to reduce CSOs to come into compliance with Clean Water Act. That work often includes stormwater management in an effort to keep runoff out of the combined sewer system.
Stormwater that causes overland flooding in homes and businesses is not the responsibility of MSD.
The consent decree also requires MSD to support property owners who experience a sewer backup that is caused by incapacity in the combined sewer system.
Want to learn more about Cincinnati's complicated sewer system?
Check out WVXU's podcast Backed Up to learn more about the history and challenges of Cincinnati's combined sewer system.
In recent severe rainstorms and for the past several decades, sewage has bubbled up in our basements and poured into our waterways. Climate change is making it worse, and the powers that be can't seem to agree on how to fix it.
Backed Up demystifies one of the most complex systems of public infrastructure — our sewers — and tells the stories of the people suffering under decades of mismanagement.
You can listen at wvxu.org/backedup or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Q&A with SMU Director Jason Fleming
Jason Fleming has been leading SMU as part of GCWW, and will now lead the effort to make the changes.
He spoke with WVXU on Sept. 30. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Generally speaking, what is the purpose of the Stormwater Management Utility?
Stormwater Management Utility has two primary functions. The first is to collect, convey, and basically get stormwater off private and public property and into receiving water. The second function is flood protection within the city. The city has a pretty complex network of gates, levees, and dams to protect the city and its infrastructure from flooding from the Ohio River and the Mill Creek.
SMU is funded by what is essentially a stormwater runoff charge collected from most property owners in the city. Are there other sources of funding?
That's the primary source. We also apply for grants and low interest loans from the state and federal government to help us implement projects, but the primary source of our funding is our stormwater fee.
How is the SMU budget spent? We've heard concerns that much of the money is distributed to other city departments.
The funds that come in from the stormwater fee are dedicated to stormwater management and improvement. The majority of those funds come to the Stormwater Management Utility for them to carry out their responsibilities, but there are several other functions that support stormwater management's efforts that are embedded in other departments.
So yes, it's true that there's funding going to those other departments, but they're doing stormwater jobs that perhaps those departments have done for decades, and they're better equipped and staffed to perform those functions rather than having them done within SMU, at least at the time.
One of the parts of the motion is to look at that to see if that can still make sense.
Can you provide an example of stormwater management work being conducted by another city department?
Probably the easiest and most visible one is street sweeping, which is a requirement of the city's national pollutant discharge permit for stormwater. We have a permit with the federal government to discharge stormwater to the river, and as part of that permit, there are requirements that we must comply with. Many of them are water quality focused. Street sweeping is an example of a water quality improvement — as we street sweep the streets and remove trash, litter, leaves, that prevents it from going into the storm system and ultimately into the river. That function is performed by another department.
MSD does a lot of stormwater management. How is that different from what SMU does?
There's a lot of overlap. The primary goal of both departments is to get liquid waste off private property and public property, and discharged into receiving water in an environmentally conscious way.
The focus of the Stormwater Management Utility is on rainwater that is collected on private or public property — we need to get that into rivers, creeks, streams to not have it impact that property. To do that, the city of Cincinnati has a combined sewer system, which has been in place for centuries, and that system not only carries sanitary sewage waste, but also stormwater. There's an overlap there in the goal of having the water get to where it needs to get, but we're sharing the space.
Stormwater impacts on that system are significant during rain events, and cause a challenge for MSD in meeting their goal of eliminating combined sewer overflows, which they've been working on since the consent decree was put in place.
There's an overlap; there's common goals, but the ultimate goal is somewhat different. We want to get water into the [separate stormwater] sewer system, and [MSD] has a need to keep as much of it out of the [combined] sewer system as they can to prevent overflows. That's where collaboration between the two departments happens to solve that problem together.
Will making SMU a standalone agency mean any changes to the budget, such as more staff, funding or other resources?
That's probably going to be the biggest thing that we need to look at and evaluate as we transition this into a standalone department, so it's hard to say. There's a lot that needs to be done to get us to where we want to be, and that takes money. But we also have to recognize that we need to be conscious of our ratepayers and the costs of service that we provide and other services that they're paying the city for, and make sure that it's reasonable. There's a balance there that we need to look at. That's definitely going to be a very big focus over the next four to six months.
We're actually performing a cost of service study right now, looking at rates, looking at upcoming needs and how they line up, so we can make a decision on whether or not they're sufficient to accomplish our goals.
What's the expected timeline for implementing the changes?
The second part of the motion requested that it be completed by the first of the year, so Jan. 1, 2027, is the goal to have this established and figured out. We've got three months to get through that process. Not all of it is going to be figured out by then, but a lot of the structural changes, ordinances, things that are needed to establish the department will be done by then.
But this is going to take several years to really finish. There's a lot of pieces that are ongoing that we can't really stop the way we're doing it, but know that we'll be putting pieces in place that'll, over time, allow us to gradually shift where we need to be. So, short term, ... the first of the year is the goal to establish the department, but this is going to be an effort that takes a while to really get finished.
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