Cobb school board chairman blasts stormwater fee proposal

Days after the Cobb Board of Commissioners voted to delay imposing a stormwater fee, the chairman of the Cobb Board of Education blasted the proposed changes, saying they would they would be “grossly unfair” to taxpaying school parents.

Republican Randy Scamihorn said  in “Just the Facts,” his occasional column, that the fee would “add to the monthly bills of hardworking parents and, again, apparently, schools across our county.”

The Cobb Water Sytem’s proposal would switch how customers are charged for stormwater services.

Currently, the charges are based on the amount of water consumption. The county wants to charge according to the amount of impervious surfaces of a building and property.

While homeowners have been most vocal in protesting what they call a “rain tax,” the impervious surface change would mean that commercial and institutional customers would be paying a larger share than they do now.

That prompted protests from the Cobb Chamber of Commerce last week.

Scamihorn wrote that “for our families who already live on a tight budget, this additional ‘fee’ on their already strained finances is grossly unfair.

“I’ve raised the impact this fee would have on our schools a number of times with district leaders,” Scamihorn wrote.

“Unfortunately, our staff does not have enough information from the Commissioners to know how much money would be taken from classrooms, but they know it would mean fewer dollars for teachers and students. We also know our schools could have been made legally exempt, but they weren’t.”

(You can read Scamihorn’s full remarks by clicking here.)

The Cobb County School District posted the message on social media channels and sent out a separate e-mail with Scamihorn’s remarks Friday.

Cobb government spokesman Ross Cavitt told East Cobb News Friday that as far as he knows, any specifics of the financial impact to the Cobb County School District haven’t been discussed, including a fee exemption.

Cavitt added it “that it is an irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars to allow an elected official to express a personal opinion through taxpayer-funded communications channels.”

After a contentious, hours-long hearing on Tuesday, Cobb commissioners voted to delay taking up a stormwater vote, and called for more public hearings to take place in August.

Among the issues is the uncertainty over how much more commercial and institutional customers would be charged for stormwater services.

Cobb Water System Director Judy Jones has indicated in various presentations that a majority of residential customers would pay between $2 to $4 a month for a dedicated stormwater utility fee and the commercial and institutional customers would pay up to $21 a month.

Those institutional customers include churches, schools and other non-profit organizations.

“After consulting with our legal team, we believe this bizarre ‘stormwater fee’ will be imposed upon schools, as well as the thousands of acres on which your schools are built,” Scamihorn wrote.

“The reality is that every school dollar taken for stormwater management is a dollar taken away from our children’s futures. . . . I know I speak for the majority of the Board when I point out that the latest proposal being brought forward by Cobb Commission Chair Lisa Cupid is fraught with problems for our schools and our parents. 

“I’m not telling you how to vote; I’m telling you what is and isn’t good for our schools and Cobb’s children.”

On the Cobb school district’s Facebook page, some citizens pushed back against Scamihorn’s comments.

Laura Judge of East Cobb, a Democratic candidate for the Post 5 school board seat, noted that talks with commissioners about the stormwater fee have been “bipartisan, heated and long. That’s why one of my hopes as a future board member is to work with the other layers of government. Not start a blog bashing them.”