← Appropriations & Oversight Committee · 2019-06-06 · Appropriations and Oversight Budget Hearing
Public Comment
Agenda original PDF
Minutes original PDF
Transcript
▶ 0:30 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: In accordance with the open meeting law, this meeting is being recorded and is being broadcast on MMTV, both on television and online, and will be available on the City of Melrose website.
▶ 0:42 Speaker 1: Motion to open the floor for public comment.
▶ 0:43 Speaker 2: So moved, Madam Chair. Second.
▶ 0:45 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: We have a motion to open the floor for public comment, made by Alderman Mortimer, seconded by Alderman Forbes. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? This is the portion of the meeting where any member of the public can come forward to speak on any item on our agenda. We have three orders before us tonight.
▶ 1:01 Speaker 3: good evening I'm Jerry Rose you got in the public works budgets first from a
▶ 1:11 Speaker 3: broad point of view one of one of the attachments was titled an Excel attach you know an Excel file or something like that it would be nice to receive files in Excel these scan PDFs that are basically I don't think you can do any analysis with them very readily certainly the public can't it would be nice if the city would put out all these documents in Excel so people can actually do some really good evaluation of what's in in them and what's been changed you
▶ 1:46 Speaker 3: know again the public works is making an assertion about all kinds of salaries that are included as indirect cost to water and sewer and they've never been and as far as I've ever seen here, justified as to what it is. They always make an assertion, oh, this is 50% of this person, 50% of this person, and we were doing 50% of the city solicitor a couple years ago for water and sewer, and everybody in the room knows that that wasn't true, but I don't see why anybody in the room isn't willing to question what the real thing is. I you know it's that the the titles in the document are a little bit vague sometimes but it seems as if the mayor's assistant is actually paid part of water and sewer that was something that showed up in that DPW budget also with DPW we
▶ 2:46 Speaker 3: did the ESCO agreement a number of years ago and I see the the lease payment for ESCO agreement in this year's budget again I have never seen any reporting about the ESCO agreement and what the energy savings has been and whether it actually has worked out well for the city or hasn't worked out well for the city I hope it has but I find it interesting that with all the focus on energy use and everything else that we haven't had anybody come in here to say what is the benefit of this where we sold the bill of goods or did we
▶ 3:29 Speaker 3: actually strike gold so another thing about indirect costs the Department of Revenue and its guidance you know it talks about things that aren't as far as I can tell absolutely you know cast in concrete but they talk about that you know one department shouldn't build another department for things because you're all part of the same entity and so you don't have one department bill another department however my understanding is the police department bills for details to the schools that's a department building a department and somehow that that type of example seems to happen but what the Department of Revenue contemplates is that if you're not billing another department so if water and sewer isn't billing the city for its water and sewer use the DOR
▶ 4:25 Speaker 3: contemplates that that discrepancy if you will gets ironed out in the budget process so that even if it's for accounting purposes nice to say okay well the city's not going to pay its water and sewer directly nothing to the water and sewer enterprise fund well there ought to be a little bit of give and take here the water and sewer enterprise fund is probably funding the city and how the superintendent could tell us four hundred five hundred hundred thousand dollars a year at this point you know that's that's another one of these end run around prop two and a half right it would be nice to see exactly how much money that is and be nice to see well what is the city giving in return historically before we had water and sewer enterprise funds historically cities did take responsibility for sometimes a substantial part of the water and sewer funds and as we move to water and sewer enterprise funds cities have like Melrose have chosen to basically ignore their responsibilities to pay for the water and sewer they use and in fact one large issue that I see is you know people claim that we want to try to save water and that's why we have to give Melrose residents that you know the third highest water rates in NWRA. Mr. Moroz, we're going to have a public hearing next week on water and sewer.
▶ 5:50 Speaker 1: I understand, but that's not on our agenda.
▶ 5:50 Speaker 3: Well, actually, but it is.
▶ 5:52 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: I know they're related, but if you can focus it, connect it to the DPW, that would be helpful for me.
▶ 5:56 Speaker 3: Well, I mean, in the things that are proposed today, it shows all kinds of stuff about water and sewer and about the city and everything else. And so, yes, what I'm trying to say is that the water and sewer payments that I believe ought to be included in the budget for DPW, since DPW is handling utilities for the entire city ought to have a fund and I believe some way or other for the water and sewer costs that are incurred by the schools by the city hall by fire station counseling agent everybody else and to put that on the ratepayers of Melrose is it's unethical in my view because the water and sewer enterprise funds were designed to try to more accurately put the cost of service on the people who are using the service and for the city to duck out from under that responsibility year after year after year and you know that we had an override pass this year for five point one eight million dollars nobody can claim that there's not still you know some horrible deficit in the city one way or another and we can argue about the schools versus the city or anything else you want to but what it comes down to is that in my view the department public works budget ought to be showing something for for water and sewer and if it doesn't then the department public works budget and the city budget ought to be showing some give back to the water and sewer enterprise funds for all the money that the city takes from that with the indirect costs that are acclaimed this is not a new issue i actually went back and read a alderman meeting minute from 2012 where the city was so proud to get away with not paying their water and sewer and what i want to say is that when the schools use water and sewer they have no incentive to save because it's not coming out of their budget so they can use all the water and sewer they want the electricity for the schools is now just listed for the last number of years as schools we used to see every school individually what it was costing and now you can't even do an analysis to figure out is the school doing better or worse than they used to do it would be nice to see those breakdowns and you know the surprise that i had last week from you that you have documents that have been circulated amongst the committee that haven't been provided to the public you know i don't know why so if you have documents about more detailed um line items than what you put out to the to the citizens please put them out there um i was looking this week to see i thought maybe you were going to put out the the issue about the salaries so we can see what each employee not necessarily by name what each employee gets fte is critical also and fte isn't tracked well in any of these documents so anybody can know how many employees are we paying for this and what it is now the superintendent public works actually did break down some of that and i appreciate that but it wasn't done in a systematic fashion that that i think the whole city budget ought to be in anyway um let me just look at my notes and see if there's something else i so please let's hear some
▶ 9:06 Speaker 3: reports about how well our energy savings is doing before we go ahead and you know we're contractually committed to a lease but we want to be sure that we weren't that we that that lease worked out well Thank you.