Owners of Big Parking Lots Have to Pay More in Northeast Ohio

Impermeable surfaces like parking lots are terrible for the environment in several ways, including the water pollution that results when stormwater runoff causes sewer systems to overflow. In Ohio, the state's highest court recently upheld a fee on parking lots to help mitigate the damage to water quality.

Greater Cleveland, like a lot of older cities, was ordered by the EPA to fix its sewer infrastructure to prevent raw sewage from being dumped into Lake Erie every time it rains. It's a not a cheap task, so it's good to see the culprits will have to pony up to help cover the costs.

Marc Lefkowitz at Green City Blue Lake looks at who will pay what. The fees aren't huge, when you consider how much it already costs to build and operate a large parking lot, but they shift incentives in the right direction:

Lefkowitz points out that some of the region's worst perpetrators of job sprawl -- like Eaton Corporation, which recently moved to a suburban highway interchange from downtown -- are going to have to pay more as well.

Elsewhere on the Network today: The League of American Bicyclists releases its comments on U.S. DOT's draft rule governing how states should measure their transportation performance. And Mobility Lab says affordable housing and transit need to be thought about in tandem.