Public Participation

Transcript (~19 min @ 1:12)

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

▶ 1:11 Peter D. Mortimer: Motion to open public participation, Mr. Chairman. Alderman Forbes has made a motion to open the floor for public participation. Said motion was duly seconded by Alderman Inferno. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Hearing none, public participation is now open. members of the public wishing to come forward and ask any questions or make any comments regarding any order on tonight's agenda may come forward now

▶ 1:41 Speaker 1: good evening mr. Tamar good evening for the record my name is Phil Tamar I live at 44 Larchmont Road this will be a little bit redundant but it's

▶ 1:53 Speaker 1: unavoidable today I expect that the water and sewer committee in the city will answer only a few of the questions long outstanding about water and sewer rate matters based on the committee meetings i've attended in today's agenda materials distributed in advance those answers will be largely unresponsive i will discuss only three of

▶ 2:10 Speaker 1: these matters briefly because of the limited time available unavoidably i will have to repeat some

▶ 2:20 Speaker 1: of what i've said previously first city officials will now justify the change in city practice to build rate payers for its own internal water and sewer consumption several years back as adopting appropriate and good practice the city previously explained the changes required or recommended by best practice this change was never mandated or encouraged to discourage by the massachusetts department of revenue which governs here and it is that ch this change that

▶ 2:47 Speaker 1: matters the change was unnecessary and shifted 270 000 of annual cost to rate payers an amount equal to two percent of the water and sewer budget and a two percent overall rate increase contrary to its stated position on the matter the city should either reverse this recently disclosed billing practice change or reduce its property tax funded budget as it should have in the first place in order to offset the costs shifted to rate payers and stay revenue neutral the correction can and should be absorbed within the city's broad 75 million dollar budget or with its free cash second this board will be asked to approve the 2017 water and sewer budgets as submitted on top of which additional amounts will be billed to rate payers for allocated charges from the property tax budget and reserve and abatement provisions both 2017 budgeted mwra charges and the remaining city controlled spending portion of the budget are planned to grow at a reasonable three percent from 2016 levels however and importantly the 2016 starting level for city controlled spending actually has already grown by an average 14 per year over the prior two years as have the additional allocated charges and reserve and abatement provisions if approved the 2017 plan institutionalizes these large prior year spending increases without further scrutiny increases which would have been otherwise limited in a proposition two and a half restricted world third and most pressing the water and sewer committee will present the board for its consideration 10 tiered water and sewer rate options which primarily just make small changes between base fee and variable rate billing components vary slightly the number and size of consumption tiers and reduce sewer charges for residents without second meters it will also present but recommend against a uniform flat rate option none of the recommended tier rate options change much if at all today's dramatically tiered rate structure which remains the big issue and source of inequity to residents today excluding mwra charges which are unequivocally constant per unit of consumption today's combined water and sewer rates require that top tier users be proven 93% more costly to service per unit of consumption than lowest-tier users, a claim which seems outlandish on its surface and which has never been supported. The MWRA may or may not require increasing block rates. Interpretations vary, even though 13 MWRA cities continue to use flat rates today, and I assume they do so legally. Regardless, the MWRA allows increasing block rates only to the extent they fairly reflect the resource demand of high-volume users.

▶ 5:38 Speaker 1: And although conservation has its place, it should not drive the tiered rate structure, since MWRA district water is not in scarce supply. The committee has included one option in the rate consultant's technical memorandum attached to the agenda to narrow tiered rates somewhat, but only modestly, and then recommends against its adoption. The committee has not considered collapsing rates significantly at all, primarily if not solely because that would require a significant increase in lowest tier rates. However, these lowest tier rates are low today only because of the huge insupportable subsidy they receive at the expense of higher tier users, including those people trapped in commonly metered multi-unit housing situations if the city chooses to adopt the uniform flat rate i stop here at a minimum the city needs to collapse its current rates by much more than any tiered rate option to be presented today basing new rates on provable unit service cost by

▶ 6:44 Speaker 1: tier i repeat what i've said previously after all this time and repeated questioning the water and sewer committee still has not provided any explanations of support for its dramatically tiered rates. Either the city can't support them or the city doesn't believe it has to support them in compliance with MWRA regulations as described. Either way, I ask this committee this final,

▶ 7:10 Speaker 2: simple, four-part question. How have you computed rates by tier, one? Two, can and will you provide

▶ 7:12 Speaker 1: specific support by cost element for the differentials between these tiers three alternatively have you no support because you instead merely set the differentiated rates completely arbitrarily and four what are the logical and regulatory bases of your approach at the very least and once and for all i asked the board of alderman to force the water and sewer committee to either answer this final question completely and clearly or develop tiered rates based on the provable unit costs of providing service or adopt the uniform flat rate option

▶ 8:09 Speaker 3: thank you mr taymor good evening mr morose hi i'm jerry morose um we start this process off here and now to get another year um my hope this year with the new consultant would be that we'd have real good data available to us to really understand the basis of the concepts and the quantify the numbers basically of what we have as costs for our water system I've been disappointed that in all the public meetings and in the public record there's been no presentation of the various cost of service in the city of Melrose to show what is the true cost of a household with a meter and a service, you know. And according to what are the true costs of that, what costs of that are costs that are by meter by household versus costs that are volumetric by the amount of use that flows through somebody's home. These are significant issues in terms of establishing water rates because if one of your goals has to be revenue stability so that you don't get stuck in a year where you have too low revenue, in my view we ought to be identifying and I think we would identify if we did the analysis well that a significant amount of Melrose charges are fixed charges for cost of our infrastructure for our meter costs for our personnel costs for you know the the billing department all those different things that as I've said here a lot of times if nobody used a gallon of water in Melrose we'd still have a significantly high cost of service to the city and the question is is how should that be born should people who happen to use more water when we only paid MWRA two dollars and fifty cents per hundred cubic feet should we should be charging some people nine dollars ten dollars a cubic foot of water to subsidize other people who are being charged less I don't I don't believe with that I think that we shouldn't have subsidies in the water accounts you know one thing that I've noticed in the process here over a number of years is that the Board of Aldermen is here to make a decision and you look for information to make that decision on and the information that you get tends to come from the same sources it's coming from people who either work for the mayor or who are working for the people who work for the mayor and if the mayor wants a certain thing put out there he puts it out there and then you ask a question of his staff and they answer in a certain way I'd like to believe that this the mayor's staff is obligated to give you a fair and honest and accurate accurate representation of what the facts are, the underlying issues, but that doesn't seem always to happen here, and I want to be specific about saying that a flat rate is illegal, I believe is a falsehood. A flat rate can be certainly legal, and in Melrose, as in many MWRA communities, I can make a very rational, logical argument as to why we don't have any increased costs to Melrose based on people's consumption do we all want to conserve everything in life so that our world is better absolutely but the way that's been done about here the way that's been proposed here isn't really about conservation it's about disproportionately applying higher costs to some people at the expense of at you know at the expense of them to benefit other people and I don't

▶ 11:40 Speaker 3: agree with that approach. I've asked the Alderman a number of times over the last few years, open this up. Let's have a public dialogue. Let's have the conversation. If everybody on the mayor's side is so secure in their position, why won't they open up to a public dialogue? Why don't you open it up to a public dialogue to let's have the issues aired out? I'm very comfortable in the conclusions that I draw I understand the gray areas in here we don't even have a sophisticated discussion because it's somebody's are proposing an extreme thing and nobody wants to hear the gray area so you have to show the opposite of the extreme of what the other extreme might be well there's not rational

▶ 12:22 Speaker 3: discourse around these issues there I think you know all these rate tears like you know they throw at us ten different options here or twenty different options whatever it might be you know they're all similar flavors you know it's it's it's not it's not significantly different in fact the one thing that I would love to see would be as I talked about before I believe that we need higher fixed fixed charges per meter in Melrose to represent to more recover the cost of the fixed charges of our system they're still trying to play around with

▶ 12:53 Speaker 3: keeping the fixed charges as low as they possibly can or maybe raising them by a two percent a year or something like that which isn't relevant if you really did a cost of service analysis which again we don't have in front of us here the proposal to give some seniors a discount and i'm just rattling through things because there's no time to talk about everything in the depth it needs to be the idea of giving some seniors a discount so that in a condo in melrose towers one person is paying you know i'm just going to make up a number 500 condo fee because a water and sewer charges largely and then the person next to them who happens to be a senior is still paying the $500 condo fee but now they're getting a you know a little discount on their water rate that to me is absolutely unfair that two people in the same class of service in the same building and one of them is being reimbursed for their water use but I want to be clear that even the person is reimbursed it's still taxed on their water here significantly because that third tier rate that's applied to almost everybody in Melrose Towers the first 2,000 cubic feet, you know, is, you know, let's say that takes a few people, right? Then the next 8,000 cubic feet, I don't know their total billing, but all I can say is that I'm sure that a lot of people's use there is billed at the highest rate, and they all incur that cost. I don't think that's appropriate. I believe that that is discriminatory, and it's not even justifiably

▶ 14:20 Speaker 3: discriminatory. The law does talk about increased blocked rates. There's very few people in this room that even understand what it means by to fairly reflect the resource demand in consumption of high volume users. That's a conversation that needs to be had if you're going to go and start to, you know, just throw out that that's not a proper thing to have a flat tier, a flat rate system. I believe we need a flat rate system. The issue of the municipal costs, we've heard it said here a few times that it's illegal for the city to pay its water and sewer bill to the enterprise fund. Again, I think that is a tax on the rate payers, that city expenses are now being foisted onto the people who happen to be rate payers in the city, and they're not funded by the revenues that are generated through the legitimate tax base and funding system of the city. It's a lot of money. Basically, your water rates are higher. They're higher because those rate payers have to pay, as Mr. Tamor said, $270,000 more in the enterprise system to reflect that. Now, we've heard people here say before and read letters saying that, oh, it's absolutely, you can't do that, or you have to do it this way or that way. Well, I've looked at the DOR informational guidance release, 2008-101. I've read it. Item number 17 at the end, if you want me to specify it, talks about this particular issue. and it says in that thing and I'd like to understand how this applies to a lot of departments here but it's not appropriate for one department in a city to charge another department in the city they aren't billing entities or billable entities it's the city versus the city and what they say is that under the uniform Massachusetts accounting system the accounting procedures say that you can't do it that way in the same paragraph they say however it is appropriate to reflect those costs within the budgeting process this is the budgeting process that you have today now the mayor doesn't want to do that because obviously we have a prop two and a half limit right and what's the goal of the mayor in general is to get as much money out of the tax revenue base so that he can collect more money to do more things in the city not a bad goal necessarily right we want to do better and do more for the city but at the same time somebody ought to be having the conversation of is it appropriate is it appropriate to put costs onto the water and sewer enterprise that aren't the cost of the people who are paying the bill without the city funding that this is an issue now because we have an enterprise fund traditionally cities hugely subsidized water and sewer fund operations you know the water and sewer bills are so low they didn't recover infrastructure costs and and your personnel costs and lots of costs they were just assumed by the city because they've been there for a lot of years you know the the charges to residents were basically for the for the marginal cost of water maybe a little bit more but right now in this thing if in this environment if we're looking to find every indirect cost that the city might expend on behalf of the enterprise fund and load those costs on to the enterprise fund it's disingenuous at a minimum for that city not to make good on the costs that it causes to the enterprise fund and reimburse the enterprise fund for those costs which is supposed to be done through the budget process so because it's not an open dialogue I have to come here and make these statements because it's not an open dialogue I have to preempt what may come behind us from people who will say something different and you don't give typically an opportunity for anybody to come and rebut what we might hear that might be based on an opinion or a foundation that is political in nature not factual in nature I've asked a number of times to find an open public process and I want to say right out front because we've heard it asserted that somehow the water and sewer rate committee was an open transparent public process it was not there was an opportunity for open dialogue discussion the open water and sewer rate committee It did not address the issues that Mr. Taymor and I have repeatedly brought to them. The Water and Sewer Rate Committee, I assert, basically violates the Open Meeting Law because all those people, not all of them, I shouldn't say, not Mr. Forbes here, but four of those people are working here in City Hall discussing water and sewer issues all the time.

▶ 18:55 Peter D. Mortimer: Mr. Moroz, the ten minutes that you're allotted has passed. You may take a minute and please wrap up and summarize.

▶ 19:03 Speaker 3: What I'd like to say is clearly there is more to say than I can say in 10 minutes. Clearly there's more to decide than the information that's brought to you to decide upon. Now, my challenge to you is, will you open up a process to have a fair hearing of all the issues and let people have an opportunity when somebody says something to show why that may not be the case, may not be desirable and to let people have an open discourse so we can actually get to some what we want to get to is we want to get to a place where the city of melrose has a water and sewer system that supports itself honestly fairly and this is another big issue and my last statement is that it's time that we do the right thing so that 5 10 15 20 years from now the Board of Aldermen then isn't suffering through the issues that you're suffering through today because of the inaction of a Board of Aldermen 5 10 15

▶ 20:06 Speaker 1: 20 years ago thank you Thank You mr. Moroz are there any other members of the

▶ 20:10 Peter D. Mortimer: public here in attendance who would like to come forward seeing none motion to

▶ 20:15 Speaker 2: close public participation Alderman Alderman's work always made a

▶ 20:18 Peter D. Mortimer: motion to close public participation duly seconded by Alderman Inferno all in favor of closing public participation please say aye aye any opposed hearing none public participation is now closed we continue on with order 2 0 1 6 dash 1 5 8 it's the city of Melrose operating budget for fiscal year 2017 the first