Property owners of Bowling Green to pay new stormwater utility beginning of 2027
BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – The floods of 2025 brought about some of the worst flood related damage in recent memory.
Bowling Green has relied heavily on the karst system to help drain that water, but with swift growth, that reliance has become a detriment.
The City of Bowling Green will now be instituting a new stormwater utility to try and raise money that will directly go toward funding stormwater infrastructure.
Since the flooding, the city has taken measures to help mitigate future flooding risks, buying at-risk property and expanding the current infrastructure. But the 2025 floods served as a lesson that as Bowling Green continues to expand, more will need to be done to better protect residents and their property.
“The city will be implementing a stormwater utility fee sometime in the first quarter of 2027. The reason that we are doing that is to try to mitigate storm damage to people’s property. People will remember the April floods, and we had so much damage from that. We can’t prevent flooding, but what we can do is try to mitigate the damage for our residents, for our businesses,” said Debi Highland West.
Homeowners will be paying an extra $4 on their utilities, while larger buildings, such as restaurants, schools and other properties will pay a higher fee based on the amount of impervious surface on their property.
The city commission passed the fee in a unanimous decision in the wake of the flooding. City officials say that these decisions are not taken lightly, and they work hard to raise and spend money as responsibly as possible.
“We try to run things on a very fiscally conservative budget, and we do that because we take taxpayer dollars very seriously. We take our residents money very seriously, and we want to be fiscally conservative. We are starting this funding stream because we see a need for it. We know there’s a need for it. April showed us there was a need for it,” Highland West said.
The city will raise around $3.5 million annually with this new utility. City officials say that you will see this new utility on your bills starting in the first quarter of 2027.
