ORDER-2016-163 : Amending Melrose Revised Ordinances, Chapter 228, Article II, Section 228-15 (Water Rates Established), as set forth herein.

Transcript (~48 min @ 29:15)

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▶ 29:02 Speaker 1: Alderman Medeiros moves to commence a public hearing second by Alderman Fern on the motion all those in favor motion passes this is a public hearing any member of the general public who wishes to come forward and speak relative to these two orders may proceed to the table in the center of the room and speak in no particular order whether you're in support of or opposed to the motion is there anybody who wishes to speak at this time I thought

▶ 29:43 Speaker 4: you might be back I do ask again for a good sufficient opportunity to have some real dialogue on this that addresses the the issues that are important to Melrose that's what I haven't heard from the consultant at this point at all I've heard applications of of kind of average national scale things to Melrose without without actually addressing the Melrose data this issue of conservation I did

▶ 30:08 Speaker 4: some research into that as well, and it's certainly not comprehensive, but I certainly found reports of some studies that talk about that indoor household use in the United States has decreased 22% between 1999 and 2016. Significantly, this study says that the decline in use

▶ 30:30 Speaker 4: from 177 gallons household per day to 138 is not due to a green wave of environmentalism breaking over the suburbs. it's basically attributable to better toilets better washing machines better dishwashers okay that's one issue and since time is limited I'm gonna move on there's another issue that the consultant brought up because I haven't talked about a lot of flourish of things at the last meeting and one of those things was this idea that um you know we have to worry about the amount of water in carbon reservoir now obviously it's a dynamic situation carbon reservoir is loaded right now we have plenty of water carbon reservoir and i want to make put this on the record mwra has a lot of good data out there you got to go looking for it but you can find it if you try carbon reservoir can support 300 million gallons a day of water to be produced for the whole area out of the carbon reservoir even as a safe level of use even in drought conditions all right back years and years ago we were using more than that I have a graph here somewhere if I can find it for you I'll show it to you years and years ago we were using more than that but um before 1980 or so but I mean we still had water it's just that if we had had a drought at that time we could have been in trouble some ways but you know we were We were using about 300 million gallons back then, but now we're using 200 million gallons in the whole area. We don't need to conserve water in our rate structure, certainly. If there was an issue where we had a drought come on for a period of years, we could certainly take steps to have water bans and have other kinds of conservation measures. You don't need to have conservation, although we all want to conserve for good reasons in general just for energy use, it's not, it shouldn't be the factor in Melrose that drives what we do here and in fact i think conservation being brought up here is just an artificial reason to try to again load more money on some people to benefit other people and it's not it's done arbitrarily the way that it's done we had mr van kampen here the other day you know he was give us again his interpretation of the statute anybody can read the statute if the statute said we had to have increasing block rates and that's all they wanted they would have put a period at that point in the statute. They would have said that said base rate shall be increased period, but they didn't. They went on to say at an increasing block rate, they could have said at an increasing block rate period, I'm sorry, they could, but they went on to say to fairly, important word, fairly reflect the resource demand in consumption of high volume uses of water. I can demonstrate if anybody wants to see that there is not a resource demand that is at in any way significant to Melrose based on the amount of water somebody uses I have here I do have here the LA some of the LA rate structure and you know they have all different things in the LA rate structure because they do have to worry about water supply we don't have to worry about that it's not in the MWRA's rates to us we don't have to put it in our rate to somebody else they are we are not constrained in any way we are not added to cost in any way beyond the marginal cost to the mwra of water that people use through their houses the consultant is going to get up here probably later on tonight as we had the consultant come back here three years ago and two years ago and last year and say something contrary to what i'm saying and you always tend

▶ 34:05 Speaker 4: to believe him because you're paying him i challenge you allow me at some level to address these issues with the consultant in front of all of you and let's find out where the truth really lies here. Let's examine the issues. One thing that I'm especially frustrated about with our consultant this year is that paying in the order of $30,000 for a contract, the first thing you do when setting water and sewer rates is to do a cost of service analysis. You want to analyze what the costs of the system are and by the function. What function do they provide to the system and so how do they apply? Do they apply, you know, if they take the amount of cost of a meter, well that applies for every account that has a meter, which is every account. If you take the cost of a water service from the corporation valve to the curb clock, well, that's a cost to every account. The cost of the billing department, mailing out a bill to everybody every quarter, is a cost to an account. The volumetric cost is only for the water we use here in Melrose mainly. The issue is that we can put in a flat rate. It's legal. It's fair. It's simple. It's transparent. It gets rid of every issue about the penalty to people in condos and apartments. You don't have to go and try to, you know, offset the craziness of the tiered rate system by trying to figure out per capita use, how many people live in a house, and if we really are trying to punish people, do we want to punish the larger families, or are we trying to punish people who use beyond a certain amount per person? You get rid of all that ridiculous stuff, put in a flat rate. I want to say out loud here in public that a flat rate, at a flat rate, people who use high volumes are actually paying more than their fair share of the pipes in the ground, of the pumping stations for the sewer, of the personnel in the water department and the sewer department, of the trucks and all the capital improvements, they are paying more money than their proportionate share by account of what they would be incurring as a cost for those services to them. This is a complex set of circumstances. I appreciate that not all of you have the willingness, the desire, the time to get into

▶ 36:17 Speaker 4: all this stuff. But don't let this be another surface conversation where you go and you say what somebody tells you that they want you to hear. Look at the facts yourself, evaluate it. At least let two people come together and show where the issues really are. Because here's the problem in Melrose. We have a difficult situation with water and sewer that needs to be addressed. And as long as we talk about these ridiculous extremes and we don't get into the nuances of the middle, we're not going to solve these problems. Now in establishing a system for next year, going to a flat rate, you're going to have some rate shock. You would have some rate shock given that we did this distorted rate starting three years ago. To offset that, I think it would be good to A, don't budget for reserves for next year. They aren't necessary. We don't have all that stuff I've talked about at other meetings, treatment plants and aquifers to protect and wells to drill and everything else in the world. We don't have that. The MWRA takes care of that. All the capital of the sewer system is on the MWRA as well through our contributions to them. We don't need to pay for reserves. We don't have to hold reserves to any large extent. Capital costs are funded in one of three ways, either prepayment through putting the money aside in advance, you build up the money, then you pay for the capital, or you pay for the capital you budgeted every year and you expended every year for capital improvements or as we do here in Melrose we bond for capital and we post pay it we pay it down the road not a bad either any of those three things are fine even the post payment is not you know any any harm or blame in fact it can take take advantage of low interest rates and future inflation to make our costs actually be lower right we don't need the reserves to pay for all those capital costs. We can bond for them. We can do that. That's a better way to do it than hold money in reserves that isn't working for us. We need to invest in our system with that money, not leave that money on the table doing nothing for us. Elderly discounts. I'm all for giving

▶ 38:19 Speaker 4: discounts to people that can't afford a water and sewer bill at some level. Not every elderly person, especially as the baby boom generation is now becoming elderly, and many of them are well off they don't need a discount just for being elderly i i at first i thought it was just people weren't mentioning it but i looked in the details i don't see anywhere it says an elderly person with low income is able to get these discounts i don't believe every elderly person ought to i'm sure that will lose some votes if you vote not to do that but the truth is is that we should be doing this for poor people if we're doing it one can certainly argue that that given that this is a city enterprise fund and the enterprise fund is an accounting method perhaps the city side of the budget ought to have a social welfare element to it where it contributes costs to the enterprise fund for those discounts i would i would put that out there it would help get us from looking as embarrassed as being second highest and the third highest in the country on on combined water and sewer rates there are so there are other issues here regarding water and sewer rates for next year if you stay with the tiered system you're getting further and further away from being able to correct it in the future the rate shock to correct it is going to be there i'm look i'm looking to propose to you to offset the rate shock this year at least by not doing the reserves by having the city pay for its own water and sewer charges as it i believe it should and by because nobody's looking at these indirect costs just i would say the easiest thing to do right now is cut the indirect costs in half say if we're billing this many indirect costs let the city absorb some indirect costs this year of course we all know that the reason for all these contortions around water and sewer rates is basically to do an end run around prop two and a half lay it on the table if you want to avoid prop two and a half that's what you're doing that's how that's one way we're doing it we're doing with the trash fee as well we're making, what, $400,000 on the trash fee. Their end runs around Prop 2 1⁄2. The problem is that we got these things out of the city budget, and then we filled them in with other things, so the city budget's full. It's not a simple solution to resolve it, but the problem is that nobody was honest with the taxpayers or the ratepayers last year with the override about what the override really could have done. We didn't do that. The Water and Sewer Enterprise Fund has not had a fair, or the Water and Sewer system and the budget for it and the rate structure has not had a fair hearing at this point it has had a distorted presentation from the mayor's side which i put the water and sewer committee with

▶ 41:08 Speaker 4: and the consultants with i don't know where this process is going to go this year but when you talk about making these things defensible what they've been doing for the last three years is not defensible if you want to have a more defensible thing let's have the conversation let's do the hard work, let's evaluate the real options, and let's make the hard choices that we need to make to figure out how to do this. We want water and sewer. We want good, healthy water. We want to get rid of our sewer. We don't want to have huge inflow and infiltration. We want to cut our rates, our costs and our rates. We can do that with the right planning. I look back at some of the Alderman's meetings over the last three years and the minutes that were very well kept for these meetings, and I've been talking about inflow and infiltration for three years. Every year we hear, oh yeah, we're going to plan next year to start getting going inflow and infiltration. Here we are three years later, we're not a whole lot better off for it. We missed three years of investment opportunity that we could now next year be getting the benefit of some inflow and infiltration work that we would have done three years ago. We're not. These are issues that we can work together to address, to resolve, to make it better for the next generations of Melrose residents instead of playing games to make things look better than they really are from 2017. as you know there's so much more i could say um

▶ 42:30 Speaker 4: i'll stop here i just um i appeal to you you know find a way to do something i will be here at other meetings if we aren't making progress i'm certain to let you know about that and i'd rather just be

▶ 43:03 Speaker 2: quiet thank you thank you sir good evening julie d lolo from circuit street um i wasn't going to to speak tonight uh but after listening to uh mr taymor and mr moroz uh it dawns on me i pay attention to this stuff but i will tell you it is so confusing i think you need to have a very layman's conversation with the public because when they talk all the the about infiltration and cubic feet and all of that i pay attention and i have a hard time following it i know my rates go up but I'd really like to understand in layman's terms what it what decisions are being made and why not about tears and the hires and the lowers and the substitutes and all that but in layman's terms I think it would help the public a great deal because I think a lot of people start listening and it's it's so confusing that they stop listening and then it's just accepted so I would ask that if there's a way to do that that we should do that

▶ 44:23 Speaker 1: that's it thank you thank you thank you anybody else wish to speak this evening

▶ 44:34 Speaker 2: Alice Shattuck at 140 Grove Street I came to talk about the water rates because I think this is such a great opportunity for the Board of Aldermen to have all these options and the impacts of them and I think it's a great opportunity to talk to the community about it and really seek the input of the people who live here because water bills have continued to be a contentious issue throughout the city especially as newer people move here a lot of times you know I'm friends with lots of people who moved here more recently and have gone oh my gosh what is with the water rates in the city they seem so much higher than anywhere else I've ever lived and people who've never cared about or noticed water bills or how they're calculated all of a sudden start caring about the water bills so I think to have all these options is really a good time to talk about how these costs are distributed and on whom the impact really falls of these these rate increases and I'm especially struck by seeing the uniform rates options I know that there's been this back and forth about you know that they're not they don't conform with Massachusetts general laws to have a uniform rate structure but certainly it you know our rates could be much flatter you could have tiered rates that are a penny apart if you wanted to do that and that would meet the requirement that the you have tiers and that would essentially be the same as the uniform rate so so from that point of view I think it's still useful to look at and it's useful to look at because when you see how disparate the impact of putting a uniform rate on the city of Melrose right now would be that that it would be such a large bump up for the lower bill sizes and it would actually be a rate decrease for the larger bill sizes that that's so important to see because that all that difference is that is the impact of putting in the tiered rate system so when you look at that those people that would actually have their bills go down going back to a uniform rate these are the people that saw this huge disproportionate impact of going over to the tiered rate and it's it's an impact of that size so I mean I think it would be really nice to see the historical of since the tiered rates were put in what these same for the same bill sizes that are in the rate options of what the increases have been since those tiered rates were put in because I guarantee what we're going to see is that these people whose rates would go down if we went back to uniform have had massive increases over the last several years and not all of them are you know big corporations or something who have the larger bills we have a family across the street from us who has three generations living in a multi-family home and you know they've seen an enormous water bill increase and I think it's just a question of basic fairness I know that we've talked about how the how the the larger users do impact the system more and the cost associated with the larger users are higher but but I know I don't know that it's as much of a higher cost on the system as we're making them pay and I I really believe that these users that are in condominiums or multifamily homes that they're subsidizing other people so that you know so that the city can cushion the impact of these higher bills on a certain set of people that they feel are the people that they don't want to notice how much these bills are going up because they're really going up lot and and and I couldn't find in this report although I'm sure it's somewhere how much the the MWRA assessments increased in terms of rates and I think it was from what I've been told was under 3% for an overall rate increase to the residents of 5% so that means that since the MWRA assessment is about 60% of the water bill that means that that what we pay for in our water rates on the city side is has gone up quite a lot and and I think that that should be something that residents see and notice and not just certain residents because we have a tiered rate system but it really should be a little bit more uniformly shared across the residents of the city and the people who got water bills so so I would encourage us to look at historically what's happened and see we can ease some of the impact on the people who've really been hit by the tiered rates quite a lot

▶ 49:18 Speaker 1: thank you thank you is there anybody else who wishes to speak this evening

▶ 49:28 Speaker 1: doesn't doesn't look like we have anyone else motion to close the public hearing second alderman inferno moves to conclude the public hearing motion is seconded by alderman mac tamar billis on the motion all those in favor opposed these orders are now before you and i would point out that we have the consultants here from raft Ellis financial consulting and Woodcock associates also a pay lengths of other city officials who were here as well what's your pleasure relative to these

▶ 50:02 Monica C. Medeiros: orders I'll remember dearest if I could perhaps have the city auditor for a moment like this just request some information for our next meeting in

▶ 50:20 Monica C. Medeiros: advance mr del russo could you come forward i apologize because i had hoped to have this request in before we had adjourned last thursday um in particular i think we've heard a lot of i've heard from a lot of residents asking about some of the other costs that are involved in water and sewer and some of the costs from the city side and in particular

▶ 50:48 Monica C. Medeiros: I'd like to see us find a way to sort of explain some of the indirect costs I think a little bit better and a little bit more detail so I have you know I've been kind of looking into it to myself so I can better understand it and better explain it and I have some of the numbers from you know what we've been paying in from those eight use in terms of indirect costs and I see things like health insurance pension shared employees shared facilities legal and insurance and I was hoping that perhaps for our next meeting maybe if I could email this off to you and perhaps you could explain like the way we did for munis some of the definitions of what's included in each of those and kind of how those calculations are determined I think those costs are when I say indirect cost there's a cost that we're I know what I see the the lump sum number coming in through the under other funding sources documents but I think it's hard for us to really understand the impact of you know what that has on the regular operating budget and since it's not clearly defined in our and not included actually in our water and sewer budgets that people would be helpful to

▶ 52:18 Speaker 1: sort of supplement that so thank you thank you anyone else any questions for

▶ 52:25 Speaker 1: mr. de la Rousseau for mr. Shana mr. van Kampen or the consultants I have a

▶ 52:35 Michael P. Zwirko: question this is for our city engineer miss Paracas Ellis thank you so much so

▶ 52:48 Michael P. Zwirko: I know that you're somewhat new to the city and I just wanted to you know take the time to say thank you for all your work I know that you're quite busy with the many many items going on so we frequently see you when we have road cuts coming in and otherwise so hats off to the work that you do I appreciate it you I have been told that you are very well versed in what we call or refer to as I and I and just in an attempt to help educate the public could you speak about that a little bit you know as much as I think I know about it I'm sure I don't sure so if you could just kind of explain what that is and where the benefits of recapturing and other methods of I and I are helpful in this area and also if there's any plans for structural repairs or fixes to our own I&I system just not only for educating the public but also myself sure so I

▶ 53:45 Speaker 2: guess starting out if I miss any of your multi-part question let me know starting out in terms of the what I and I really is so it's inflow and infiltration into the sewer system infiltration is a little bit easier to understand that's just water that comes in when the groundwater table is typically higher than the the depth of the pipes and you can have especially in systems as old as melrose's you can have leaking joints you can have leaks in old brick manholes so that's what's considered direct infiltration and then inflow is rainfall induced extraneous water coming into the sewer system so it's rain water that gets in through manhole covers that have holes and again it could be leaking joints or pipes but this would be when rain water is actually falling it could be cross connections between the drainage system and the sewer and then there's indirect inflow which is sump pumps essentially it's water that comes in after it's rained when there's a longer term impact like people have floods in their basements or they have or another private inflow source is roof leaders that are tied into your sewer system so private inflow is illegal any connections between the drainage system and sewer system are illegal and so that's one type of I and I that can be tackled and then there's fixing the actual pipe defects in the older pipe systems to tackle the infiltration and the immediate inflow during rain the the issue in Melrose is largely the older system and also the issue is that the way the MWI assessments work so for water it's a very easy calculation it's just basically how much we use and they assess a different rate each year based on usage and percent share of of the system to set the next year's rate but for sewer there's a calculation in the rate setting that takes into account your peak month and peak month in New England is entirely driven by inflow and infiltration we never have a peak sewer use month that's because everybody's flushing their toilets at once Melrose's percentage in the 2015 data or I think it's actually 2014 data that MWRA has available is on the order of 59 percent of our sewer flow over an annual average is from INI so we get charged not only per gallon for those extraneous flows then we also get charged an extra basically what amounts to a surcharge for having a high peak month INI is something that you need to constantly be fixing and preventing and eliminating if you do it a little while and then you take a decade off from from repairing ini it comes back it new leaks crop up sometimes you fix leaks in one place and it just forces the water to go down to the next available place where it can then come into the sewer so it does require an ongoing and a fairly holistic approach to solving it we've done some substantial investment in ini in the past years but coming in with a fresh set of eyes what I can see is that we've we've targeted areas that were known problem areas within the sewer system so they might be areas where we've historically had blockages or other issues but those aren't necessarily the areas where the peak flows are coming in so what we're doing right now is we're actually in the final week of a 10-week flow monitoring period so we have 30 flow meters throughout the city they take a reading every 15 minutes and they download that data and we're getting all of that data as it comes in and as of next week we will have 10 weeks worth of 15 minute data for 30 different locations at that point our consultants from Weston Sampson will do a fairly lengthy analysis where they divide up what's in flow what's infiltration and which sub areas contribute the most and then from there you do additional investigations to find what's actually causing it so we plan to target the the most leaky areas and like I said it splits out what's influence infiltration so you know what areas do you just need a lot of public education for sump pump disconnections and you know you can do smoke testing for to see if you have your drainage system tied into your sewer system so there's different targeted approaches that are for inflow versus infiltration so we'll embark on those and we plan on coming back in the fall for an appropriation or a loan from the MWRA I think I mentioned last time that I was in front of you that the MWRA program for this coming year is 75% grant money and it's money we absolutely need to take advantage of it's our money that we're giving MWRA and so if we're not using it a different town is taking advantage of those grant funds thank you for that so you had mentioned about the

▶ 59:08 Michael P. Zwirko: average month but there's no real peak with this type of it's the peak the peak month it's the month that they select but there's no real month that I guess what I'm saying is throughout the year we're pretty on average right I mean do

▶ 59:24 Speaker 2: we have one we have giant we have giant peaks the peak times tend to be spring rains snowmelt and sometimes snowfall depending on how excessive it is and the

▶ 59:35 Speaker 3: you had said that it's it's a it's something that we that needs to

▶ 59:39 Michael P. Zwirko: constantly be maintained in order to kind of keep your head above water lack of pun intended and attacking this problem so my question is was there a period of time where you put you know hit pause on I and I infrastructure repair I mean I guess what I'm saying is if our figures are high and the return on investment is good why all of a sudden do we have a large you know why is our

▶ 1:00:09 Speaker 2: peak so high I don't think I think we've made efforts over the years and tried to keep up on it but I don't think we've kept pace with where we should be so I think we've fallen behind and the other issue with the MWRI assessments is that not only do you need to do really well but you need to do better than your neighboring communities because the MWRI is fixed costs aren't really changing And so if everybody's doing the same quality I&I removal job that we are, then we're all just keeping pace. We need to do better so that our rates come down compared to everybody else.

▶ 1:00:45 Speaker 1: Anyone else? Questions or comments? Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

▶ 1:00:58 Speaker 1: Anything else on these orders this evening?

▶ 1:01:03 Speaker 1: Alderman Forbes.

▶ 1:01:04 Scott M. Forbes: Yes, Mr. President. I know we have the consultants here. I just, if you'd like to come up here and maybe address some of the things that have been said this evening. Or there's just a couple of questions that I have for you as well. So since we have you here, we might as well take advantage of the time, correct?

▶ 1:01:32 Speaker 6: Let's start with your questions.

▶ 1:01:34 Speaker 1: Could you gentlemen identify yourselves again, please? My name is Dave Fox, Reptiles Financial Consultants.

▶ 1:01:41 Speaker 6: I'm Christopher Woodcock, Woodcock & Associates.

▶ 1:01:43 Scott M. Forbes: thank you all right i went and did a did a little math when we had the the first tiered rate which was i believe fiscal year 14 up until what fiscal year 17 is with our proposed rates it's pretty much a a 20 increase across the board from fiscal year 14 to one of the rate models we have for fiscal year 17. i think when we started these tiers um i think it was our mindset that we were going to be looking at something more modest and I think that's what that was where that was what was presented to the board and so now we have the issue where you have people in the bottom tier that are experiencing a 20% increase over the last three years people in the middle tier people in the upper tier all in the same way so I it's a system that we can sit here and say you know everybody's not happy with and they just want answers I think the whole board is just looking for for answers and be able to like we said to justify the numbers so when we have rates where you're saying that it's six dollars and 35 cents for tier one is that just based upon how much we owe the MWRA is there an analysis where there's six dollars and 35 cents is a dollar for water a dollar for sewer is there some type of formula that you plug in there or is it just based upon the money that we owe that you back into the number that way and

▶ 1:03:11 Speaker 6: then go through the tiers accordingly sure that's a great question it's it's

▶ 1:03:16 Speaker 6: really a little of both of those that's involved in it water and sewer are

▶ 1:03:24 Speaker 6: separate the amounts that are related to water are related to the cost of water that are in the water budgets and sewer related to the sewer budgets of the city of Melrose so those two are separate and distinct from each other in terms of the amounts for each tier it's really a mix of costs and policy considerations involved in doing it there are some suggestions earlier that we didn't do any cost analysis or cost of service analysis and that's that's not true there was certainly analyses of portions of the costs where we were able to do it to do a full cost of service study that's traditionally done the accounting that you need the breakdown of your costs needs to be something that's different from what Melrose has and that's not a criticism of the city of Melrose it's it's it's the same situation in all 351 cities and towns in the Commonwealth it's really a function of the accounting system the Department of Revenue has where you don't break down your costs into treatment transmission distribution services fire hydrants metering billing collection etc and you really need that kind of detailed breakdown of all of your costs all of the assets all of the capital costs all of the operating costs to go through with that full study to do all of those to the extent we can do it based on information that we have for those places that do have those kinds of breakdowns and there are some that do have and private water companies do some of the other states in New England have breakdowns like that Maine that in Rhode Island in particular where there's utility commissions involved with some of the municipalities where they do have that kind of breakdown that will enable us to do that so to the extent we could identify the costs that are in the base charge and we talked about those on Thursday night those new base charges we've done those to the extent we can the other thing that goes into it is that first step really should at least pay for the MWRA's cost that's a cost of what water is delivered to the city limits if you will by the MWRA or in the case of sewer of the the cost of the sewage when you take it at city limits that goes eventually to Deer Island and so that first step really ought to cover those costs and it does and that's something that we looked at here to make sure that it does that beyond that it starts to get into some policy issues and I know there was some discussion Thursday night there's some discussion again tonight about plenty of water we don't have to worry about it there's tons of water in the Quabbin etc etc yeah there is there is a lot of water right now in the Quabbin Reservoir but as we discussed Thursday night there's a lot of policy consideration and setting rates and one of those policy considerations that you all decide is is what to do with different aspects of it and one of them is conservation and conservation is important thing within the Commonwealth right now and as I said Thursday night this isn't just a matter of saving water if it was matter of just saving water we probably wouldn't be spending time or the emphasis on it that we are because there is enough water in the Quabbin and the Wachusa reservoirs as we sit here in May of 2016 that wasn't always the case as Mr. Moroz had said earlier there was in the early 80s problems with that and there and we were running up against how much water was available at the MWRA since then there's been a lot more communities there's been a lot of reductions in consumption certainly some of them are due to the plumbing standards. There's no questions Mr. Ross is absolutely correct about that. Those are part of the reasons there have been reductions in consumption. As I said Thursday night, I believe the adoption of conservation rate structures, particularly increasing block rate structures, has also had a big element in doing, in encouraging water conservation and making sure we are below that safe yield. Again, as I said Thursday night, this isn't just a matter of conserving water resources. There are a lot of resources we're talking about here. We're talking about capital resources, money used to expand systems, put in new pipes, larger pipes, either MWRA or in Melrose. So there's capital resources related to water. There's capital resources related to sewer. To the extent you cut back on water use, you're probably cutting back infiltration and inflow aside. But the sewage, the sewage that comes out of households, to the extent that's reduced by water conservation, there's less treatment cost associated with the MWRA, and that saves the MWRA in the long run. Not the short run. There's been a lot of discussion about how the MWRA's costs are primarily fixed, and that's true. But in the long run, they aren't fixed. And when they went ahead with the design of Deer Island and the outfall pipe and the hundreds of millions of dollars involved in that. We were looking at, and I was involved in that, we were looking at what the new consumptions were and the reduced consumptions, not the increases in consumptions, and that I think probably saved everybody within the MWRA service area some money and continues to save it by not having to build as large facilities to treat the wastewater. And then on top of that, there's the energy cost. The treatment of water, the treatment of wastewater, the pumping of water and wastewater to get to households involves a considerable amount of energy and the um the conservation of the energy resources the impact on our carbon footprint on climate change are enormous and shouldn't be underestimated and to characterize it as only related to water resources um is a false argument there are a lot more resources than just water resources involved and that's what comes in in in setting those next steps, getting back to your question, Alderman Forbes, about the amounts in there. And that gets into a little bit of art as well as science as to how much those increases there should be between the different steps. The Commonwealth, in their conservation standards, makes it clear that the difference between the steps should be significant. They should have meaning. If you're going to charge $5, $5.01 and $5.02 on the tiers, tears are irrelevant they don't mean anything if you've only got a penny or two difference in between them and it's only because of the the differentials in them that it starts to get people's attention and makes them conserve now whether a dollar a day for water two dollars a day for sewer is so expensive that it's going to force people to go back and start putting bricks in their toilets like we used to ages ago and cutting way back on water consumption probably not but when you start seeing water bills going up more and more it does get people's attention and if you see your water bill going down maybe you're not going up as much as people who don't conserve it also gets people's intention and I think there's a certainly a mentality out there amongst consumers and it's not just residents it's businesses too that have to pay water and sewer bills that they're starting to pay a little more attention to what the cost of water is and it's through those higher rates through the tiers knowing that if I use more and more water it's going to be more expensive than it was in the first year or in the second tier for the case of the very large users going to be more than that that starts to get them to think about what kind of investments can I make at my business at my home in plumbing to help cut back on water consumption and that's that's really the difference in where those those numbers come from okay and when we talk about

▶ 1:11:22 Scott M. Forbes: the tiers like at the end this is this would be my final question before I I yield the floor to my to my colleagues when you talk about the tiers going from tier one to tier two tier two to tier three do you have a model on how you increase it from one to two and from two to three is there is there a science to it is you're saying that from one to two you know we're gonna go up 20% in the rate due to a B and C okay can you explain that to us yeah I guess the easy

▶ 1:11:54 Speaker 6: answer is it's probably more art than science and how that's done some of the alternatives that we gave you were just across the board from what you have now and so those are really dictated by what you adopted before in rates and what those tiers were and how those came about we also looked at options that had only two tiers we looked at an option that collapsed the tiers too because of some of the comments that have come from the public that have been heard and so we did look at those to look at those the exact numbers know this it's not a number that's exactly there it's more of a policy and how much policy how much emphasis you want to give to the tears or not give to the tears and remain true at least to the law that's that's there and I think your your solicitor has already explained his position at least on that law sure I think the reason why

▶ 1:12:46 Scott M. Forbes: we're all you know there has to be this dialogue is because you know I don't have I don't have chapter 165 section to be in front of me but when it says that it fairly reflects you know the tiered rate block structure that failure reflects usage for consumption I know I'm paraphrasing here but there's no guideline you know there's there's no standard the it's out there and it's a statement but the reason why I think we're having these discussions and we're trying to figure out what is the best way to charge the ratepayers is because beyond that it's almost that the municipality can make up whatever structure they want to make up because they're saying that it fairly reflects the law when in actuality there's no guideline to hold any municipality to give them a set of standards moving forward I mean I think that would be easier for everybody if we had those but unfortunately that's that's not where we are so that's why these you know this is rolling over from meeting into meeting so we can make sure that we're going to dot our I's, cross our T's, and come up with the best plan that is for all of our residents, because I'm voting to raise my own water

▶ 1:14:00 Speaker 6: bill. You may not believe it, but there's a lot that Jerry tells you that I agree with, and I couldn't agree more with him than his characterization about the wording of the law. I think it was unfortunate. I think it's poor wording, but I'm not in the legislature. I don't get to make those decisions on how to do it. It would be very nice if there were more guidance. There is There's some guidance outside that law that comes from American Water Works Association and looking at what's in those tiers. As I said, some of that guidance looks at that first step, at least cover the MWRA cost. That seems to be a pretty well agreed upon method to come up with that first tier.

▶ 1:14:41 Speaker 6: Now I will tell you that there are communities where the first tier is below the MWRA cost And what they have done is they have decided they would make the lowest tier cheaper than the MWRA cost in order to make it available for elderly or poor customers and don't have some sort of a discount. It's a terrible way of doing it. Your income status, your age status has nothing to do with how much water you use. But there are communities that do that, that set that first tier low to make it affordable. Now, everybody gets it, whether they've got, you know, a million dollars or have no money. Everybody gets that affordable way. So it's not a very good way of doing it. I think that the discount that Melrose has is probably a better way of delivering that treatment to the elderly customers in terms of that amount. Other guidance goes to a meaningful difference. Again, not a huge amount of help. What's meaningful? I think we can probably all agree that a one-cent difference isn't meaningful. We can probably all agree $0.05 isn't, is $0.50, I don't know, maybe some of us would agree and some of us wouldn't. Is $1, you know, that's where it starts to get gray, and that's where it gets into, I think, frankly, an awful lot of policy, if you will, which is why you guys get all the big bucks to decide those policy issues.

▶ 1:16:08 Scott M. Forbes: All right, well, I thank you for your time, and we're relying on you to give us valuable input, So I appreciate the dialogue, and I know that we'll be talking again. So thank you, Ms. Christensen. Thank you.

▶ 1:16:21 Speaker 1: Anyone else with questions or comments for these gentlemen? I just have one quick question. Alvin Zorco.

▶ 1:16:27 Michael P. Zwirko: Thank you, President Kahn. So this question is for Mr. Fox. Excuse me. On Friday, I had sent what I've called like a hybrid proposal. I didn't hear from you or the sender, so I was just curious. Did you receive that proposal?

▶ 1:16:44 Speaker 1: I was not able to complete that for this evening. I apologize. No, I didn't think that you would have time

▶ 1:16:47 Michael P. Zwirko: I just didn't know if you received it. That was just my question. Yes

▶ 1:16:51 Speaker 1: No, I have all the information. I just like I said didn't have time. No, I apologize. I understood. Thank you That was all right. Thank you. Anyone else? Okay. Thank you gentlemen