Cape Coral has set its stormwater fee at 163 dollars a unit for the year that starts in October, a seven dollar rise that is the fifth in a row, and the city puts the extra money into drainage, canals and flood prevention work

Cape Coral property owners will pay 163 dollars per equivalent residential unit in stormwater fees in the financial year that begins on October 1, up from 156 dollars, under the final rate resolution the City Council took up at its regular meeting on Wednesday afternoon.

The measure is Resolution 221-26, listed for a public hearing on the council's revised agenda for August 26. Its title reads that it relates to the imposition of stormwater user fees, establishes the amount of the user fee for the fiscal year beginning October 1, 2026, imposes the fees against property within the city to fund the city's stormwater programme, authorises the collection of delinquent stormwater charges and approves the stormwater user fee roll.

Gulf Coast News, reporting from the meeting, says the council approved the seven dollar increase. Its report, by Jaylen Baron, was updated at 7.02 p.m. The city's minutes for a meeting held the same afternoon are not yet published, and no vote tally is available from either source.

The rate itself comes from the city's own paperwork rather than from the reporting. The agenda request form filed with the resolution states that Chapter 22 of the City Code requires an annual stormwater user fee rate resolution alongside the budget, and that the city "desires to increase the fee for Fiscal Year 2026-2027 from $156 per Equivalent Residential Unit to $163 per Equivalent Residential Unit."

This was the last scheduled step rather than the first. The staff presentation records that the introductory resolution, 174-26, passed on July 22, that notices went out to assessed property owners in the first week of August, and that Resolution 221-26 "represents the final resolution."

A seven dollar step, for the fifth year running

The increase follows a schedule the city set three years ago. A stormwater rate study completed in fiscal 2023, covering fiscal 2024 through fiscal 2033, underpins the annual rise, and the city's own table shows how steady it has been:

Each of the last four steps has been exactly seven dollars. Measured from fiscal 2022, the fee has risen by 33 dollars, or about 25 percent.

The city expects the fee to raise 27,061,119 dollars in fiscal 2027, against 25,971,924 dollars adopted for the current year, an increase of 1,089,195 dollars. The slide carrying those figures attaches its own caution: the total assumes a 96 percent collection rate, and it may differ from the proposed budget because the number of equivalent residential units in the calculation is being updated. Collection has been close to complete this year, with 25,950,002 dollars of the 25,971,924 dollars adopted actually collected, or 99.92 percent.

What the fee pays for

The programme covers both routine maintenance and capital work. On the maintenance side the city lists swale regrading, drainage pipe maintenance and replacement, canal maintenance, street sweeping, vacuum truck operations, right of way surface water management and system inspections, together with the freshwater and saltwater canal dredging programmes.

For fiscal 2027 the presentation sets out 1.8 million dollars for environmental and water quality improvements, 1.7 million dollars for drainage improvements and 500,000 dollars for flood prevention, plus one heavy equipment operator, one service worker and a swale crew added to staff.

Four capital projects sit alongside that programme funding: 7.728 million dollars for drainage improvements at Trafalgar, 3.3 million dollars for weir improvements, 2.625 million dollars to replace 83 catch basins, and 1.0 million dollars to retrofit the stormwater system at Rotary Dog Park.

It is not on the TRIM notice

The stormwater charge is a user fee collected on the stormwater user fee roll and certified for collection with property taxes. It is not an ad valorem tax, which means it does not appear in the taxable value or the proposed tax figures on the TRIM notice mailed in August, and it does not move with a property's assessed value.

That distinction matters for anyone budgeting from the notice. The same run of public hearings on Wednesday's agenda also carried the fiscal 2027 non ad valorem assessment rolls for solid waste service, fire protection and lot mowing, none of which appear on the TRIM notice either.

The fee is charged per equivalent residential unit rather than per parcel, with the single family home as the reference unit. A property carrying more than one unit will see more than seven dollars. The city has published no worked example of an individual bill, and none is calculated here.