Hilton Head gated areas stopped a stormwater plan that would have cost them. It’s back
After public backlash forced the Town of Hilton Head Island to abandon a stormwater agreement with the island’s gated communities in early 2019, a reworked plan for using taxpayer money to repair drainage problems in those communities is final.
The updated agreement includes more input from the general managers of gated communities. It also puts the onus on property owners’ associations to make sure the town can access stormwater drainage systems that may be covered up by homeowner patios or sheds.
Hilton Head’s Town Council will discuss the agreement this afternoon at its regular meeting.
The motivating factor for the standard stormwater agreement is that several smaller POAs on the island are requesting public maintenance and repair service of their private stormwater drainage systems. Those communities include Spanish Wells, Yacht Cove, Wells East, Bermuda Pointe, Jarvis Creek Club, Seagrass Landing, Carolina Isles and Beach City Place, according to Wednesday’s meeting materials.
While stormwater isn’t necessarily an attention-catching topic in other communities, Hilton Head must balance concerns over its ecosystem as well as the friction between public and private communities. The clashes make the negotiations charged.
The new agreement, which is very similar to the proposed 2019 agreement, will allow gated communities to opt into public maintenance for drainage projects. That’s controversial for some outside the gated communities because it means taxpayer dollars will be spent in private communities inaccessible to the public. Supporters of the agreement point out that residents in gated communities are still taxpayers and say stormwater drainage is an interconnected system that disregards neighborhood boundaries.
The biggest difference in the 2020 agreement is the amount of time it’s been in the hands of gated community managers. In 2019, they said they were “blindsided” by the proposed plan and needed more time to review it with operators of golf courses and other assets in their communities.
Negative responses spearheaded by general manager of Hilton Head Plantation Peter Kristian and then-Indigo Run general manager Chip Munday squelched the agreement, and town engineers went back to work on another version the general managers could review.
“We got ourselves into a hornet’s nest here that (we’re) trying to recover from,” Director of Public Projects / Chief Engineer Scott Liggett told the finance and administrative committee in February 2019. “It was a bad, bad reaction that we elicited.”
What’s in the new agreement?
This time, the stormwater agreement has been reviewed extensively by gated community managers, and the town has made changes, Town Engineer Jeff Buckalew said.
Hilton Head is the only stormwater utility in Beaufort County that performs maintenance in gated communities, which make up 70% of the island.
“Bluffton and Beaufort County don’t do that,” Buckalew said. “In the stormwater utility world... they’re surprised we have any type of agreement with private gated communities.”
The town’s responsibility is to take care of “qualifying deficiencies” within gated communities if they opt into the new agreement. That means that most problems that occur behind the gates fall to the town to repair and pay for.
The updated agreement defines those problems more narrowly, meaning the gated communities would be responsible for:
- Operation of lagoons, including lowering water levels before storms.
- Fixing aesthetic problems, including lagoon or tidal erosion.
- Maintenance and replacement of devices that control the flow of water like small dams around lagoons.
- Provision of access, at no cost to the town, to sites where repairs are needed if the area is overgrown or built over.
All of that could cost gated communities more.
This go-around at a stormwater agreement also makes clear that POAs are responsible for ensuring the town has access to the part of system they need to repair.
If a homeowner has a deck that blocks access to a pipe or ditch, “the town is not going to get into a dispute with the property owner over that,” Buckalew said. “The POA has to do that.”
How much money goes to stormwater?
The town and the county collect stormwater fees from each household — $150 per year — to fund projects as they arise, no matter where they occur on the island.
That fee jumped from from $108.70 to its current rate in 2018, according to the town budget.
That year, the town budgeted $2.42 million for stormwater repair projects in 10 gated communities, and $3.36 million for 26 projects outside the gates, town finance director John Troyer told The Island Packet last year.
In the early 2000s, the town signed agreements with gated communities to take over stormwater projects behind the gates, according to town engineer Jeff Netzinger.
This story was originally published November 4, 2020 at 3:10 PM.
