Springtime in North Carolina normally showcases two things I love: the environment and teamwork. Even if your work doesn’t involve environmental protection, it’s hard not to think about environment this time of year with trees budding out in a green … Read more

Infrastructure has been in the news a lot lately. The president highlighted it in his budget speech/State of the Union address, and if you live in North Carolina, you heard the Governor highlight it in his State of the State speech … Read more

Just in case you aren’t up on your stormwater finance acronyms, the long version of today’s blog post is A Municipal Separate Stormwater System (MS4) uses a Public Private Partnership (P3) to address a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) Regulation. … Read more

Greentown, USA wants to join some of its large older city peers such as Washington and Philadelphia that are rebranding themselves as Green Environmental Cities. Greentown wants to become the greenest small town in the country and would like to encourage property owners across their town to plant more trees, convert their rain shedding roofs into rain absorbing green space, and dig up their pavement and replace it with rain gardens and other stormwater systems that reduce run-off. They have started a media blitz promoting this green transformation, yet progress has been painfully slow. Older shopping centers like Southside Center continue to produce torrents of rainwater runoff laden with oil and trash that pollutes the area’s waterways. Retrofitting existing space is costly and property owners have other competing needs for their scarce renovation dollars, and education alone only goes so far in promoting transformation. The city council is deadlocked between a contingent that wants to enact regulation that requires older properties to “Greenify” and a contingent that thinks the city should just use public grants to incentivize the transformation. Greentown, like many communities across the country, is stuck. What’s the solution?

Green Infrastructure (GI), a common term to refer to a range of different types of small and mid-scale installations that support water management and other environmental goals, has become a growing component of many local government’s environmental stewardship strategies. Rain gardens, restored urban water-ways, increased tree plantings, permeable pavement and other distributed “nature mimicking” infrastructure installations are making their way into Green Infrastructure plans across the country. Whether local governments used debt financing or pay as you go financing, they will need to find a reliable source of revenue to pay for these installations. Water and wastewater utilities have water fees. Landfill managers have tipping fees. Road managers tend to rely on a mix of local, state and federal taxes augmented with toll roads. What will be the dominant bottom up revenue for Green Infrastructure? Will we see Green Infrastructure utilities? Green Infrastructure taxes? The answer, as is the case with most local environmental finance questions, will be “it likely will depend” on the region and financial culture of the local government.

  It happens almost every year: my family goes to the beach, and we invariably see an amazing house for sale that inspires us to dream. It takes only a few seconds to realize purchasing a beach house by ourselves … Read more

Big News in the World of Innovative Water Rate Design Last week, one of the most interesting water rate structures we’ve seen recently was narrowly voted down in a referendum vote.  After several years of debate and campaigns to win … Read more

In the span of a week, Americans witnessed two important days – Tax Day on April 15th, and Earth Day on April 22nd. While we saw many celebrations on Earth Day, on the infamous day that tax forms are due, moods … Read more

Beginning around this time every year, I start to come across annual reports summarizing governmental, non-profit, and other organizations’ progress in different environmental and financial pursuits. Some annual reports are all about finance, some are more about the environment, and … Read more

Jeff Hughes is a Faculty member at the UNC School of Government and the Director of the UNC Environmental Finance Center.  The EFC carries out a lot of research and produces a number of tools that track and analyze how much customers across … Read more