Public Comment

Transcript (~10 min @ 1:02)

Speakers identified by voice; unnamed voices are numbered within this recording. Auto-caption text — verify against the video.

▶ 0:58 Speaker 3: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

▶ 1:14 Peter D. Mortimer: Madam President, I make a motion to open the floor for public comment. Second.

▶ 1:19 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: We have a motion to open the floor for public comment made by Alderman Mortimer, seconded by Alderman Boisselle. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? The floor is now open for public comment. Good evening.

▶ 1:41 Speaker 4: Hi, good evening. My name is Jerry Morose. I'm here to speak in public comment. the portion of the meeting when I can say things and then after the fact you can exploit your rules to misrepresent what I say and mischaracterize what I say. What we have here in part is a

▶ 1:58 Speaker 4: communication problem. When I come here to speak about an issue, I don't claim everything done by this board is wrong. I don't show up for the majority of your meetings. I don't say we shouldn't spend money on on authentic items of course we should somehow some of you

▶ 2:20 Speaker 4: hearing me actually believe that I'm saying everything's wrong with the city

▶ 2:25 Speaker 4: I'd like to think that we have a higher level of discourse than that in this

▶ 2:32 Speaker 4: city you know continually when I come here I met with elected officials and city city staff not not exclusively everybody but I met often with elected officials and city staff choosing to use logical fallacies to misrepresent me and

▶ 2:55 Speaker 4: what I'm saying. Does anybody in this room believe that it's civic-minded to deny that our city needs improvement? Conversely, do you believe that someone who criticizes some element of the city in order to get it to improve is not a civic-minded person? Maybe we need to take a step back and see what our

▶ 3:17 Speaker 4: beliefs are here. You know, this board as an institution, I believe, should be embarrassed

▶ 3:23 Speaker 4: when members exploit your rules to get to a circumstance or a representation that's anything

▶ 3:41 Speaker 4: other than the truth. You know, to mischaracterize a private citizen's views by manipulating the conversation after the private citizen has to sit down and can't say a word, that's abusive it's abusive of rhetoric rhetoric it's abusive a lot of things

▶ 4:02 Speaker 4: why does this board continually bend over backwards to give opportunities for the city staff to misrepresent things that you know they're misrepresenting to mischaracterize things out of context in a frame that's not real why do you do that how does that help no rose i don't think

▶ 4:25 Speaker 4: it does. You know, when I question the money grab that indirect costs are way beyond the pale, I'm met with a straw man argument that I can't actually address afterwards in the meeting. The argument is that, oh, I think that they're representing that I'm saying that indirect costs are just wrong. I don't say that at all. Indirect costs are real. But the straw man argument used there stands out to me. And in fact, you know, it's funny as I sit here and I sat here the other night and I go through these proceedings it's like a

▶ 5:01 Speaker 4: philosophy 101 course you know we have the ad hominem argument certainly the straw man argument the appeal to ignorance false dichotomy slippery slope circular arguments hasty generalizations red herring appeal to authority equivocation bandwagon appeal to pity all these arguments are thrown up there, and I ask, why do you think they are? It confounds me as to why. I must be an optimist, however. I come here

▶ 5:38 Speaker 4: regularly, right? Hoping that the members of this board will finally engage honestly with the issues that I raise. But instead of

▶ 5:46 Speaker 4: being met in this august chamber with honest discourse year after year, I'm met with the same logical fallacies. and again I ask why it's a red flag to me there's a number of red flags I asked

▶ 6:06 Speaker 4: why the chart that I gave you right now is a legitimate representation in a good

▶ 6:11 Speaker 4: frame of how you can compare the average water and sewer bills of a community what was represented in exhibit 10 in your packet which is just a list of the average water and sewer bills for all the different communities didn't account at all for the amount of varying use of the communities for your city staff to put that out there I'd like to believe they know full well that that's they're not not a good representation of where Melrose lies but they put it out there anyway do they believe that you're dumb enough to let it go by you or do they believe that you're complicit enough in their representations to as some of you do, to jump right on. But where it was being described that, oh

▶ 6:57 Speaker 4: Mellow's down in the middle of the list, well you know we use very little water and sewer per average household here. 50, 100 cubic feet is what we use as average.

▶ 7:10 Speaker 4: It's very low. Now look, there's a lot of variables in anything you do and it comes down to how do you evaluate them, right? You've got your data but you got to put a frame around it about what you can project from that, what it implies what the limitations of it are we never have that conversation here do we we have documents brought out that are we have documents presented

▶ 7:38 Speaker 4: regularly that there is a much better representation of the issue that's supposedly at hand that could be brought forward but it's not so instead of mellows being in the middle of the pack on this document this document and i i may have missed made a mistake of this i said 2018 average residential account it it's from the 2018 mwra retail rate survey it might be 2017 i don't know for sure but what i want to say is that Melrose here is the third highest in the MWRA of the average cost of their water and sewer bill

▶ 8:23 Speaker 4: in the context of the average amount of water used in that bill. The misrepresentation, the misdirection of exhibit 10 is another red flag to me. Why do people choose that? Why do they use things that they know don't support it and are orthogonal to what the issue is.

▶ 8:47 Speaker 4: I challenge this board, when you vote on water

▶ 8:52 Speaker 4: and sewer operating budgets, when you vote on indirect costs, when you vote on the water and sewer rates ultimately,

▶ 9:03 Speaker 4: I challenge you only to vote in the affirmative if you know for a fact that everything that's been presented to you is correct, is honest, is real, is presented in a context that's legitimate,

▶ 9:20 Speaker 4: you know all the underlying information and especially for all of you who are running for mayor or running for board of aldermen again i challenge you especially because i will hold you

▶ 9:35 Speaker 4: accountable if you make an affirmative vote i'm still saying if i'm hoping if you make an affirmative vote on this i will challenge you as to what you're wrong about and why

▶ 9:47 Speaker 4: you know for the city to come here with that thing they think they were going to put that one by on me you know I understand it's irrelevant when the city

▶ 10:03 Speaker 4: auditor misrepresents an audit as implying anything other than what the audit was designed to find that's professional something I'll let you use

▶ 10:16 Speaker 4: the word right to represent that because somehow somebody looks at one tiny piece of something about a budget implies that the whole budget is then therefore stamped and certified by somebody is ridiculous the five million dollar example of school security funds over the last eight years is a prime example

▶ 10:44 Speaker 4: of that you know the issue of reserves in the water and sewer account what are we reserving the money for to build it up and sit there because our grandchildren would like to say oh we have you know twenty million dollars in reserves that we never use never will use i mean i i kind of feel that this this city is budgeting the way it does because it feels like it's incompetent but it feels like they can't figure out approximately what the real numbers could be so let's just thank you mr morales your 10 minutes

▶ 11:20 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: has expired thank you thank you are there any other members of the public wishing to speak in