CHAMPAIGN -- Just more than a year after the city council gave the green light to city staff to explore a new storm water fee to be imposed on property owners, the council this week will look at more detailed information on how that extra revenue might be used.

The council will meet in study session at 7 p.m. on Tuesday in the Champaign City Building, 102 N. Neil St., to discuss the storm water fee, which would be assessed on property owners for the demand they put on city sewers.

Public Works Director Dennis Schmidt estimates the fee could cost a single-family homeowner between $60 and $85 annually, depending on how much extra revenue the council decides it should generate.

City council members guided city staff to begin exploring the fee last year, not long after the council approved $25 million worth of improvements to storm water drainage systems throughout the city.

But Schmidt said there are still up to $80 million worth of storm water needs that would go unfunded without the fee.

"There's no more money available for capital projects," Schmidt said.

City officials and a committee devoted to exploring the fee have spent the past year examining how other cities have structured the fee. Schmidt said more than 1,000 municipalities nationwide have such a charge, but only 12 are in Illinois. Bloomington and Normal are among those 12, and last year Urbana hired a consultant to begin exploring the fee.

The committee has also put together two expenditure plans for the revenue generated by the fee: one anticipates $2.2 million in new revenue and the other lists $3.2 million worth of projects. Council members will decide which plan is appropriate, and that will ultimately guide officials on how much residents will need to be charged.

Right now, property and sales taxes provide the money needed to pay for city storm water projects. A storm water utility fee could free up more than $2.6 million in general fund money if the council chooses the plan that would be more expensive for property owners.

That money, in turn, could be used to fund general operating costs like police and fire services or, it could continue to fund storm water projects for a system that does not always leave residents' properties dry. But Schmidt said that storm water bills would not begin to go out until the latter half of 2012 at the earliest, so the fee can have no immediate effect on the budget as the city looks to cut millions of dollars' worth of services.

Assuming the council approves a proposed expenditure plan on Tuesday, the storm water committee will spend the next few months establishing a structure for the fee.

Schmidt said he would push for a simple structure: a flat fee for single-family residences and a charge to other properties based on the area of their hard surfaces like roofs, driveways and parking lots that produce storm water runoff.

That structure would keep down the costs of administering the fee, Schmidt said, and shift some of the burden off homeowners. Although 78 percent of the city's properties are single-family residences, he expects those owners would foot about 30 percent of the bill. The bulk of the charges would go to commercial and industrial properties.

With huge footprints and expansive parking lots, big box stores like Walmart and Menards, for example, generate much more demand on city sewers than does a typical home.

"Believe me, they produce a whole lot more runoff than your little home," Schmidt said. "Guaranteed."