Public Comment

Transcript (~9 min @ 24:13)

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▶ 23:53 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: Garabedian to accept the minutes of the February 19th, March 4th, March 18th, April 8th, and April 16th minutes of the meetings of the Board of Aldermen without reading. This has been seconded by Alderman Mortimer. Is there any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? The minutes have been accepted. Thank you.

▶ 24:13 Peter D. Mortimer: Motion to open the floor for public comment. Madam President? Second. Motion to open the

▶ 24:17 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: floor for public comment made by Alderman Mortimer, seconded by Alderman Boisselle. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? This is the portion of our meeting that any member of the public may come forward to speak on any item on our agenda. Is there anyone wishing to speak this evening?

▶ 24:37 Speaker 2: Good evening.

▶ 24:39 Speaker 4: Good evening.

▶ 24:45 Speaker 4: I'm Jerry Morose. I was disappointed to see that the budget that's in your packet and on the website is the same kind of budget as we've had in so many prior years. Number one, you ought to be able to put out a spreadsheet so people can actually take a budget and perform some analysis with it. number two it would be nice to have in one document the actual values from closed prior years say 2016 17 18 to compare to it would also be nice to see what our difference in budgeting was for those prior years to our actuals to see how close we came because every year there are projections made in the budget that don't come true later on but we never go back and look at them to see why there was a discrepancy at the same time there is a column in your budget that you have posted that you know you show the actual year-to-date expenditures and then you show what you project as a year as a final year expenditures and there's from looking at it looks like there's no thought or planning or rational analysis that went into what the projected amount is um you know you can't figure out next year if you don't have a rational basis of what this year is going to be and um it's unfortunate that you're starting off the board the city council board of alderman in the hole again where you're not given the data with the appropriate tools to actually evaluate the budget well in order to determine what is the appropriateness of each of these different

▶ 26:39 Speaker 4: proposed line items from the mayor um separately i talked about water and sewer at your earlier meeting a little bit but i do want to highlight that i i um i attended as many of the water and sewer rate committee meetings as i found in the 49 hours before they were ever posted It's not even clear that some were posted 48 hours in advance, but for you to expect that the city is going to be able to engage with giving no more than a 48-hour notice before a meeting occurs, that's not respecting the citizens to be part of the process. At the same time, that Water and Sewer Rate Committee, in my observations of it, has not engaged ... They've heard a lot of things talked about from DPW and say, oh, this is what we're going to do and this is what we're going to do and this is what we're going to propose and all this but there's no real conversation or discussion about alternatives and why would you do this versus why would you do that you know what if we did this now we actually were paying again a consultant to help us with our rates again this year you know but that consultant isn't he there's plenty of capacity there that if we ask them questions we could get some wonderful informative answers from about figuring out what our policies could be but by and large we don't ask those questions somehow that consultant get the message oh we don't want to raise the volumetric rates this year see if you can justify that and see if you can justify raising the base rates five bucks on the sewer the expertise that

▶ 28:09 Speaker 4: that consultant is capable of isn't tapped that consultant could actually do a cost of service analysis for us to figure out probably for the i don't even know what money we spend on him but we could do a cost of service analysis to figure out what are the costs of our water and sewer system and how can we align our experience of costs with the revenue we want to bring in and again if we have a cold wet summer like we've had in april and now in the beginning of may that is the time that our water and sewer rate structure is going to fail us maybe that's why your bank rolling you know four million dollars in the reserves and retained earnings you know because you don't want to plan on a valid rate structure that won't get caught with its pants down because we have a wet summer in a cold

▶ 29:03 Speaker 4: and wet summer you know I yearn for the time when this board will engage in things and although you've set up a prospective structure whereas somebody could engage in these things, you know, have no illusions that the Water and Sewer Rate Committee has done anything about actually analyzing what we could do, what we could make better, how we could make it better, what would be efficient, what would be effective. All they've done is basically it's another rubber stamp committee of whatever the mayor wants to do politically, it's what we do.

▶ 29:40 Speaker 4: In terms of water and sewer, well again, in terms of water and sewer rates, I believe

▶ 29:51 Speaker 4: that we ought to be lowering our rates on water significantly volumetrically. We should increase them somewhat on the base rates so that we have more of our fixed costs covered by fixed charges of residence. It makes it a better correlation than we have right now. suicide again it is it is just mindless not to get ahead of the curve of the other towns we have now millions of dollars in the um in the sewer reserves and retained earnings accounts that you'll have as of the end of fy 19 as well that money can be used to benefit our city to sit here and be the leakiest pipes in the mwra is shameful and it's not only shameful because we're doing nothing about it it's shameful because we're wasting the money of people in this community having them pay water and sewer charges that we're just passing on to MWRA because we aren't willing to do the job making it right at the same time I want to call attention now that the you know the city claims that we're in a great financial position you know the city has at some level unethically if not illegally charging all the water and sewer use from all of our city properties the schools the city buildings the fire the police the parks charging all those costs to the rate payers of the water and sewer enterprise funds the city is a consumer of those funds like every other rate payer the city ought to be paying its share of expenses and to keep burying the heads in the sand and ignoring that fact you know why i come here is to be sure that you are aware of that and if you vote to do that again and with all the surplus that we have now and everything if you vote to do that again and not have the city pay its fair share you are all in my view doing an unethical thing because the water and sewer accounts are supposed to be there to separate things out and have people pay according to their use and to give the city your free pass and let that money be spent arbitrarily on other things when it's really not the city's money to spend on those other things isn't right you know as much as you use the prop two and a half override process to get five point one eight million dollars more for the schools respect the laws in the in the premise of the the revenue structure and how we spend our money to make certain that we do the right thing you know I know a lot of people wanted to close their eyes in the past ago we can't afford it so yeah it's not right and we'll just do this because it's not well you know again you can't claim that now there's money there's a lot of money the city ought to be paying its bill as I recall in the last few years it was in the 400 or more thousand hundred four hundred thousand or more dollar range that the city is putting its water and sewer bill on to the ratepayers please end that practice thank you for your