Public Participation

Transcript (~16 min @ 22:20)

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

▶ 21:44 John N. Tramontozzi: I am the Chairman, Alderman John Tramontozzi. And with us is the Vice Chairman Alderman Francis Wright. Also voting members, Alderman Peter Mortimer and Alderman Michael Zwirko. And of course, President, ex-officio member, President of the Board, Donald Kahn Jr. voting members this evening present with us alderman Boisselle alderman inferno and alderman mary beth magatir margolis uh do we have uh just for the record the uh this meeting is being recorded pursuant to uh the massachusetts open meeting law and is available for viewing and i think i mentioned everybody so is there uh so moved motion to open the floor for public

▶ 22:29 Peter D. Mortimer: Public participation. Second.

▶ 22:33 John N. Tramontozzi: We have a motion for public participation by Alderman Mortimer, seconded by Alderman Boisselle. In the motion, all in favor? Aye. Any opposed, seeing none. We have with us this evening, anybody members of the public who wish to come forward to speak on. We have one order on the agenda this evening, and we have a member of the public who wishes to be here and speak. Please identify yourself and make a note on the paper before you, you name it.

▶ 23:02 Speaker 5: Thank you. My name is Jeremy Rose. I reside at 62 Mount Vernon Street.

▶ 23:11 Speaker 5: A month ago when you last had some discussion about this order, I was disappointed that rather than expanding the role of citizens on the committee from what the presentation of the order was, people were talking about about going less and somebody else talked about leaving the treasurer on the committee when that's not necessarily what's what's implied now one of the things that I see in the city is that most of the committees in the city are comprised of citizens not of employees and staff of the city when when people were making policy recommendations to the board you want them to come from a broad range of perspectives not everybody who's just embedded in the city telling you what the city you know in kind of a closed arena decides that they want to do you know I fear that in part the whole we've gotten into in the water and sewer infrastructure has been due to the fact that we haven't had outside people on the water and sewer committee all over the state all over the country people have citizen members of water and sewer committees and there's often plumbers on there and and a whole range of people who do economic analysis and things like that here we don't have that um and so i would urge this board and i i sent to you i don't did all of you get um something i emailed to the board some did not some didn't okay anyway i emailed a um a letter and i'll i can give you copies if you don't have them um stating some of the reasons why i think that instead of having a six-member board as you have now with five members who essentially work for the mayor and one member who's from the board of aldermen i would suggest that we're better off having a five-member board three citizens ordinary citizens on the committee and the city engineer and one member of the board of aldermen as you have today

▶ 25:21 Speaker 5: there are many reasons for that the the city engineer can certainly well represent the position of the department Department of Public Works right now you have three people in the Department of Public Works on the committee the city engineer the director and one of the staff people working in the water department as you know the building office so clearly one person can replace those three and we don't have to take the time and energies of the the staff person or of the director of public works with plenty of other things to do than than sit in the meeting talking

▶ 25:55 Speaker 5: about water and sewer issues um at the same time right now we have the city auditor and the city treasurer on the on the committee and you know the purpose of them you might certainly say you might want information from them from time to time for them to submit information but i would suggest that just as you do with the board of aldermen and you request information from employees of the city to present to you here the water and sewer committee if they need information from the auditor or from the treasurer they can certainly make a request and it can be submitted in writing or if they need to appear at a meeting and have a a short presentation that would be possible too i do want to emphasize though that that there is a real good reason for having citizens on this board and for having it as a majority of citizens because if it's a majority of citizens on the board the citizens basically can help determine the direction of where we go with water and sewer the citizens are the rate payers they are the ones who are affected and obviously everybody has their own little niche and we need people who are broad minded and can think about all the different types of rate payers even when they're there but we don't we personally i don't think we've seen that representation on the water and sewer committee for the years that i've been paying attention to it I think that just for committee work in general and

▶ 27:18 Speaker 5: committees that I established and I put together with other people as just a partner we try to bring together people who have varying perspectives we aren't looking for a unanimous agreement on things we want to bring the varying tensions into the room to figure out how they play out what's important what's not important is this more important than that or is this cost higher than that that that reward um to have unanimous agreement as we typically do with a six to nothing vote on a water and sewer committee at some level some people who who work in this field would say or who work in the field of of committee process would say that that's not an effective committee if there's no ever not ever any disagreement if there's always full agreement somebody's not pushing hard enough to find that that balance point of what's the best you can do where it meets people's um you know almost sense of awkwardness a sense of worry um i do want to emphasize that we are the leakiest sewer system in the mwra district i haven't seen the latest figures but we were a year ago right we got to that point because we didn't have forward-looking people having a policy impact on what we did with our water and sewer system and that was a failure over decades the current water and sewer committee isn't that old but over the decades we always had the city government emphasis in making decisions and we've continued that for the last five or six years as well and it hasn't served us well some of you might argue that well now the city is acknowledging that with a leakiest system in the in the state and you're they're acknowledging that there's some inequities in the system and that maybe this whole rate tiered structure wasn't absolutely necessary as they claimed before

▶ 29:16 Speaker 5: the there's several issues about that that even if they have this newfound awareness of something clearly the fact that they had to be presented to people for them to come around over a period of years to understand something shows that they don't innately get it right there's a there's a political process here you're looking puzzled there you know if you might not know something and then I tell you something you think oh I know what I don't need you to tell me any more about it well clearly if you don't understand the basis of something and you go in one direction ignoring the basis and then somebody gives you the the you know the calculated result to say you know yeah you have the calculated result but without knowing everything that went into it how do you incorporate in other decisions those same those same premises that are involved in that it's this isn't a simple looking at water and sewer issues is not a simple thing there are a lot of competing positions competing resources for competing things and you have to balance a lot of issues around the city how much money you can you can actually get from the rate payers versus what you need to do with it you know if you're going to have money what's the biggest bang for the buck and how do you invest it and this board certainly isn't expected to have the expertise of looking into those or the time to look into those in depth you have plenty of other issues in the city to do I would suggest that some some citizens can bring some some expertise and some attention and research to these issues that could present a very different picture than what you've seen in the years in the last few years in

▶ 30:55 Speaker 5: one point that I want to make it it's certainly my personal opinion but the The fact that we're sitting with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of

▶ 31:09 Speaker 5: dollars sitting in reserve accounts or sitting as free cash and not working to make our system less leaky on the sewer side and even less leaky on the water side means that somebody's not paying attention. The fact that we're willing to invest the free money or the very low interest money MWRA gives us doesn't to me telegraph or signal that the people in the city who are pushing the issues understand the real hole that we're in. We need to make the investment with the money we have and frankly to bond some more money to get a handle on our water and sewer issues for generations to come. And as I've been saying the last four or five years here at this board is the sooner we do this work, because of the way that the MWRA sewer rates are established, the sooner we do this work ahead of, if you will, the other cities and towns in the MWRA district, if we get ahead of them, we have a benefit. If we only use our proportionate amount of money from the MWRA going forward, as they do, we can save all the sewerage in the world. It's not going to save us any money because everybody else is reducing commensurately i raise this issue because even today the the position of the city-led water and sewer committee is such that we need to keep all this hundreds and hundreds of more than a million dollars sitting doing nothing for the water and sewer enterprise fund the rate payers have paid the money it ought to be invested in the fund for the rate payers and none of the city leaders who are on that water and sewer committee are getting that message they aren't hearing that the money ought to be working for us not sitting in a bank looking pretty it doesn't help anybody there um

▶ 33:10 Speaker 5: in short you know i know alderman khan proposed two people on this board and there was some discussion last time about you know well you know different things um but again i i stand by my proposal that three citizen members a board of alderman member and a city employee member who i think would be natural for the city engineer given that the city engineer is a person that attends the mwra board meetings and advisory board meetings that person would bring the most to bear to a to a committee like that it's important also i want to be clear that we don't all we don't all on all the committees in the city we don't have staff or board of alderman on typically but it is a good idea to have a staff person there i believe the the dpw city engineer there because it's good to have an institutional representative somebody who has the capability of scheduling meetings keeping minutes making certain that communications go out getting the documentation that might be needed from the dpw or from somewhere else to in hand that would be a valuable resource i think on the committee so i would certainly want to keep a dpw person on there but again you know planning board zoning board mellows commission on women all these things don't have aren't loaded up with with primarily city staff and nor should they be and i would think that for parity and essentially parity purposes as well as good public policy purposes i believe this board ought to increase what alderman presented as two citizen members and make it three i don't think what one of the aldermen suggested about the city treasurer staying on the board is important because frankly the the work of the city treasurer is really not is tangential to what happens at the water and sewer committee the city auditor might have information but certainly city auditors information is what's required not his position as a um you know if you will as a um a person close to the mayor to push the mayor's perspective the mayor has that opportunity through the dpw director through the city engineer if he wants some policy representative that meeting otherwise so um you know it's important number one that

▶ 35:27 Speaker 5: we have good safe sanitary water and sanitary sewer system it's also important that we look at what the costs of service are to supply that to all of our residents and businesses and city municipal uses and that we find a fair method of apportioning the costs based on the

▶ 35:51 Speaker 5: cost of service to the various elements in the city i don't see that this has been effectively accomplished with the current makeup of the board certainly which is why i thank alderman khan for his for his order here i think i would certainly like to see one step further and let the citizens be in control the rate payers be in control of recommending to you you have the final say obviously right let the citizens have more say about what's recommended to you and why because the city staff the mayor already has a large amount of power in presenting what he wants to and these other perspectives these other other elements are what haven't been coming to the surface except what somebody can come here and speak about in 10 minutes one time Anyway, as always, thank you for your thoughtful consideration of my comments today. Especially if you disagree with me, you may make a decision tonight, but especially if you disagree with me, I'd like you to let me know and I'd like to know why. The materials I give you, the things that I say, I put a lot of thought and effort and I'd like to be sure that there's not some misunderstanding that something that I'm intending to tell you or inform you about you somehow misinterpret please you know provide me the courtesy of letting me respond if you disagree with me in some way let's have a discussion about it it's okay we can disagree in some parts i in closing i'd like to say i would like to see more disagreement at more of our committee meetings at more of our board of alderman meetings because when you see disagreement you know that you're making progress that's then probably at the extent that you need to make progress not just going and taking little baby steps and so everybody's getting comfortable with it we need a little bit of discomfort in the city we need people to push the the envelope a little bit especially in the water and sewer system because it's so embarrassing that we are so bad as being the worst in the nwra in our sewer system so thank you very much for your consideration and i look forward to listening to your comments thank you

▶ 37:59 John N. Tramontozzi: very good thank you is there any other members of the public who wish to come forward and speak on this order seeing none motion to close public participation second we have a motion to close public participation by alderman mortimer seconded by alderman Boisselle on the motion all in favor

▶ 38:18 John N. Tramontozzi: you can't second it oh second that's right you're not you're a non-voting member right we have a second by alderman's work who is avoiding the voting number thank you all in favor aye any opposing none so I'm gonna read let me just read into the record the order so we have one order and that's order number 2017 dash 82 to amend the Melrose revised ordinances chapter 228 section 228 dash 15 B water rate review committee as set forth here in this order is sponsored by president of the Board of Aldermen, Donald Kahn. Let me read it. It says, Be it ordained by the Mayoral's Board of Aldermen that Section 228.15 be amended to provide. There is hereby created a Water Rate Review Committee to consist of the Director of Public Works, the City Auditor, an Alderman Appointment by the President of the Board of Aldermen, and two citizens Appointment by the President of the Board of Aldermen. The Committee shall meet at least quarterly ready to review the water rates established pursuant to this section, the cost of operating the water system, and any capital improvements to the system. It shall report its findings and any recommendations to the Board of Aldermen no later than the 13th day of April each year, sponsored by President Donald Kahn. President Kahn, you have the floor.