President Trump signed an executive order on September 16 that revokes a 2009 directive tied to Chesapeake Bay cleanup and instructs the Environmental Protection Agency to press seven watershed jurisdictions on their local stormwater fees. The order itself describes those charges, often called rain taxes, as imposing hundreds of dollars a year in costs on residents and small businesses. None of that language changes who actually sets the fee line on a household’s water or utility bill, or who has the legal power to take it off.
What the September 16 order actually revokes and orders
The order revokes Executive Order 13508, the 2009 Chesapeake Bay Protection and Restoration order that directed federal agencies and the bay’s watershed states to coordinate on water-quality goals for seventeen years. The text of the new order says that 2009 directive never required local governments to fund stormwater programs through fees, but that many jurisdictions built fee-funded programs in its name anyway.
In its place, the new order tells the Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Interior and War, along with the EPA administrator, to redirect Chesapeake Bay funding toward projects with measurable water-quality results. It separately instructs EPA to work with Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, West Virginia and the District of Columbia — the seven jurisdictions EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program has coordinated with since the 1980s — to tally what stormwater fees currently cost residents and, in the order’s words, to “encourage the repeal or rescission” of those charges.
Free relief finder: Property-tax freezes, exemptions and utility help for older homeowners usually only apply after someone asks. See what to look for with the free relief finder.
Encouraging repeal is not repealing a fee
The order’s own language is instructive: it directs EPA to encourage repeal, not to repeal anything itself, and its closing section states plainly that the order creates no enforceable right or benefit and does not alter any agency’s existing legal authority. A stormwater fee is typically created by a state statute, a local ordinance or a sanitary-authority resolution — none of which a presidential order can rewrite.
That distinction shows up directly in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The Wyoming Valley Sanitary Authority bills a stormwater fee to property owners in every municipality enrolled in its Regional Stormwater Management Program, calculated from each parcel’s impervious surface, and the authority’s own billing page still lists that fee as active today, with no reference to the new federal order. The charge was set through the authority’s own fee resolution, adopted to fund the regional program the authority runs under its stormwater permit obligations, not through Executive Order 13508 or anything it revokes. A presidential order that revokes a different, 2009 directive has no mechanism reaching into that resolution, so the September 16 order changes nothing about what Luzerne County property owners see on their bill. Whether the authority’s board ever revisits that resolution is a decision for the board and the municipalities it serves, not for the EPA.
What the fee still costs, and who still writes the rules
The dollar figure in the order stays general — “hundreds of dollars in annual financial burdens” — because stormwater charges are typically billed by impervious surface area and local rate schedule rather than a single national number. Most utilities and sanitary authorities show the charge as its own line, separate from metered water or sewer usage, so it does not shrink just because a household cuts back on water use. That structure is also why the order cannot simply zero out the charge: EPA has no billing relationship with the household paying it, no rate-setting authority over the local utility, and no mechanism written into the order that changes what shows up on next month’s statement.
What the order can do is redirect federal money and apply public pressure. The White House’s own account of the order says EPA cut close to $1 million in administrative costs from its Chesapeake Bay Program in fiscal year 2026 while increasing direct funding to the seven jurisdictions. None of that funding shift, by itself, lowers a single water bill. Whether a state legislature, county board or sanitary authority responds to the federal pressure by actually voting to cut or drop a stormwater fee is a decision those bodies still have to make on their own.
City Hall Still Writes the Bill
Stormwater charges are just one of several home-cost line items that state and local governments set on their own, separate from whatever Washington directs. Property taxes, utility surcharges and drainage assessments all follow the same pattern: the rate, the exemption and the relief option are decided locally, and none of them change without someone applying for it at that level.
The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit lays out the five kinds of property-tax relief available to older homeowners and includes an application log and renewal calendar for keeping track of each one.
Look up the five kinds of property-tax relief in The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit.
AI-assisted research and drafting; reviewed by an editor.
