← City Council · 2015-11-09 · City Council Regular Meeting
Public Participation
Agenda original PDF
Minutes original PDF
Transcript
▶ 0:36 Speaker 1: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and
▶ 0:42 Speaker 7: to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
▶ 0:52 Peter D. Mortimer: Mr. President, I make a motion to open the floor for public participation.
▶ 0:56 Speaker 1: Alderman Mortimer moves that we commence public participation for this evening. And the motion is seconded by Alderman Boisselle. All those in favor of the motion, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? Motion passes. Public participation is commenced pursuant to our rules. Anybody who wishes to speak on any matter that is on our agenda this evening is welcome to do so. And I also would remind everyone that our meeting will be rebroadcast on Melrose Cable Television in accordance with the laws of the commonwealth.
▶ 1:36 Speaker 9: Hi, I'm Jerry Moroz.
▶ 1:41 Speaker 9: I've been in front of this board a number of times the last few years regarding water
▶ 1:49 Speaker 9: and sewer issues, and I attended the water and sewer committee meeting the other day on last Thursday.
▶ 2:02 Speaker 9: I was discouraged that the water and sewer committee wants to just have public comment for five minutes and hear what i have to say and then go on and do whatever they do
▶ 2:15 Speaker 9: we're not going to fix things without dialogue here the city on its own hasn't done the job
▶ 2:24 Speaker 9: i was looking through a report sent from the mwra to the u.s epa it's an annual report on the state of the sewer system um because obviously we have um we had some problems with our sewer
▶ 2:40 Speaker 9: system years ago in the eps there's a metric that the mwra uses it's using the industry to establish
▶ 2:49 Speaker 5: how leaky are our sewer pipes in melrose and the metric is has an engineering calculation and
▶ 2:52 Speaker 9: and there's some, it gives an estimate,
▶ 2:56 Speaker 5: but the metric takes the number of miles of sewer we have,
▶ 3:01 Speaker 5: and it takes how large the pipes are
▶ 3:03 Speaker 9: in those miles of sewerage, and they come up with this thing called
▶ 3:06 Speaker 5: an inch diameter mile.
▶ 3:10 Speaker 5: And what they do is they try, by doing that they can compare us and Boston and Newton and Quincy and all the 43 communities in the MWRA, and how much infiltration into the sewer pipes we have because obviously we look great compared to Boston in absolute flow rate, but the question is how leaky are our pipes?
▶ 3:30 Speaker 5: So on this metric of gallons per day of leakage of infiltration per inch diameter mile, and again it's a result of a number of engineering calculations and estimates, but Melrose comes
▶ 3:47 Speaker 5: in of the 43 MWRA sewer communities, Melrose comes in number one as the highest rate of infiltration in gallons per day per inch diameter mile of the whole mwra district 4 431 gallons per day per inch diameter mile that's not good
▶ 4:06 Speaker 5: since everybody loves to compare us to the middlesex league and since 43 things there's a lot to show on a thing i did a graph of the middlesex league and and i want to be clear it
▶ 4:19 Speaker 5: starts at zero here and it goes up to where we are at 4431 gallons per day the next closest to us in the middlesex league is wakefield at about 3 000 gallons per day per inch diameter mile stoneham then we go all the way down to burlington which is actually at about looks like about 1200 gallons per day we are not doing well in infiltration in melrose this is why three years ago i was begging you to invest the money from bonding into our sewer system rather than
▶ 4:52 Speaker 5: buying water meters that's gone by now but the question is what are we going to do about this because this impacts us hugely in our sewer bills on your agenda tonight you have some ordinances
▶ 5:08 Speaker 5: regarding water and sewer all the games that have been played around water and sewer the last few
▶ 5:16 Speaker 5: years have caused you to do things here that have been talking about minutiae. The big issue is infiltration, as I'm showing here, and the second big issue is, I want to define infiltration for everybody here, infiltration would be what you would call non-point source leakage, where around the city, underground, there's all little separate areas where this water comes in.
▶ 5:42 Speaker 9: Some are big areas where water comes in, some not so much, but it's not point source.
▶ 5:45 Speaker 5: There's another thing that we call inflow, which is basically point source water coming
▶ 5:52 Speaker 5: into our sewer system that doesn't belong there. It typically comes from people who have some pumps, who don't even know some of them, that
▶ 6:03 Speaker 9: there's some pump that's pumping into the sewerage system, or who don't know that there's
▶ 6:05 Speaker 5: another thing you can do with the water, or maybe they know and they just feel that they don't know what they could do to do differently. And in the 30 years, about 30 years the MWRA has been talking about these issues, Melrose has never made any effort at all to control the inflow from houses into the sewage system,
▶ 6:31 Speaker 5: which gives us, we are better off on inflow. We're only fifth out of the 43 communities in how high our inflow is. This is, by the way, these numbers are calendar year 2014.
▶ 6:43 Speaker 9: They were just reported to the EPA in August of this year.
▶ 6:47 Speaker 5: But both inflow and infiltration, we're at the top. With infiltration, we're at the top.
▶ 6:56 Speaker 9: With inflow alone, we're fifth in the whole MWRA district.
▶ 7:06 Speaker 5: When you go and play, when you go and set the rates, you're acting as if there's nothing you can do about our costs. we hear a lot of people in this room say oh well you know we got to get on the MWRA and make them lower their rates they're not accountable MWRA is doing a pretty good job you can find fault with them like you can find fault with any agency but we can control a lot of what we do by controlling what we put into
▶ 7:30 Speaker 5: our sewer system both intentionally and unintentionally but either way you know we're all consciously letting this water flow there at least since I've been
▶ 7:42 Speaker 5: been talking about it for a number of years in terms of the ordinances on the table tonight and I didn't even go back and look at them all I just saw there was a whole bunch of them there you know get rid of the games of tiered rates a flat rate water system will work just fine and if anybody cares to have a conversation about it so you can understand why a flat rate system works just fine and it actually does penalize high volume users more than low volume users because even with a flat rate system high volume users pay more than their proportionate share of the fixed cost the capital cost of our own water
▶ 8:18 Speaker 5: system and of our sewer system itself these are all red herrings that have been introduced into the process and they inure to the detriment of Melrose and our water and sewer rates I come to you here tonight in part because as I've
▶ 8:36 Speaker 5: done the last three years i went to the water and sewer committee meeting i don't see a process
▶ 8:41 Speaker 5: there that's going to get to these issues what i hear there as well maybe instead of doing a project every few years at inflow infiltration we'll make it a program and we'll do a little bit year by year that's not good enough we have an opportunity to get ahead of other communities this is our we're actually in competition with not just the middlesex league we're in competition with 43 other 43 communities in total 42 others in the MWRA district the sooner we lower our inflow and infiltration relative to them the less share we pay of the huge debt service for MWRA that's what we can make a huge impact and if we don't act we're not going to and if we just keep using now the phase 9 and phase 10 funds the MWRA provides back to us to help us incentivize working on our system if we just use those funds like every other town is doing we're all gonna do better but at the same level we're still paying that high proportionate share higher
▶ 9:44 Speaker 5: than what we really should pay I don't know where to go with this because I've come here a number of years I've gone to the Water and Sewer Committee a number of years and where do we at with top in the hold MWRA top in the Middlesex League it's not working something has to change somebody here needs to make certain that we do something about it or it's not going to change and we're still going to be sitting here but next June I don't want to hear anybody in this room whining about the MWRA costs they are billing us appropriately because we are
▶ 10:18 Speaker 5: a wasteful user of sewer services the MWRA sewer system is sized for three times the capacity of what they really need to have for treating sewage on a on a daily basis, and they size it for that because of towns like Melrose that when there's a rain event, we're the ones dumping three times the amount of water than what we should be dumping down there. We had on December 6th last year, we had about an inch of rain, and December 9th, we had about an inch and a half of rain, and I didn't look at the exact dates, but it was about
▶ 10:45 Speaker 9: the same time that Melrose football team was playing in the Super Bowl, and you remember the rain that day. I think most of you were pretty soaked.
▶ 10:51 Speaker 5: Because of those couple of rain events in December, our average daily use that month
▶ 10:57 Speaker 5: was about 9 million gallons per day because of all the excess inflow and infiltration. It ordinarily would have been an average of about, even with our regular I&I that's always going in, it would have been maybe about, say, 3 million gallons a day on average. So do the math, 6 million extra gallons a day times 30 days, what's that, 180 million
▶ 11:25 Speaker 5: gallons extra that went down our sewer pipes that we not only were billed for the use of
▶ 11:34 Speaker 5: it, we were also penalized because that was our high month in 2014 by far above all our are the months but that's the month the MWRA uses to calculate along with the high month in 2013 in 2012 they do a three-year average to calculate how much of those capital costs in part we're going to pay we have the opportunity to
▶ 11:59 Speaker 5: control what we do we need to seize that opportunity we didn't do it in my view unfortunately with the water meter bond that two and a half million dollars we'd already be seeing a payoff in that by now if we had bonded to do I&I work but I don't know where to go I've come here I've gone there I'm not getting any warm fuzzy feelings that people are listening and wanting to do something about it so
▶ 12:29 Speaker 5: please when you consider the things to do again if what I would like you to do is get rid of the tiered system and decide that right now for next year there's gonna be no tiered system you're gonna do a true accurate real pricing that is transparent everybody knows when they use them water how much it's going to be get that off the table and I can tell you why it's unfair in a hundred different ways but if you get that off the table we can start to do some real work about what we can do to actually control our costs in Melrose so that in theory maybe those high rates that you're embarrassed to have maybe could come down and not be so high one other thing from the meeting the other day that I want to make certain that everybody here in this room understands It took a little bit of time, but thanks to Alderman Tramontozzi, the city admitted that all the city water use for City Hall, for all the schools, the fire station, the police station, the senior center, all the city use of water and sewer is actually being put on the water and sewer rate payers.
▶ 13:33 Speaker 5: The city's not paying its water bill to the water and sewer enterprise funds.
▶ 13:38 Speaker 5: And I don't think that's appropriate. I think that the city costs ought to be borne by our regular tax base as is appropriate for most city expenses, and all of you that are city solicitors, you know, let me know. But to say that a family with five kids and a couple grandparents living with them are paying more than their proportionate share of city expenses because you're paying the city things through the water bills is not appropriate in my view. And I think that it's time to be open and transparent and, at some level, honest about the costs of the city being borne by the city and the revenues from property taxes and other miscellaneous revenues, rather than by inappropriately and disproportionately taxing people through their water usage. I think that's not right.
▶ 14:34 Speaker 5: I'd like to see how we can make a difference in this. I'm open for suggestions. I know this is not the time for you to talk to me.
▶ 14:42 Speaker 9: I'd like you to respond at some point. Thank you.
▶ 14:43 Speaker 1: Thank you, sir.
▶ 14:47 Speaker 1: Anybody else who wishes to address the Board on public participation this evening?
▶ 14:51 Peter D. Mortimer: Motion to close public participation, Mr. President. Second.
▶ 14:54 Speaker 1: Alderman Mortimer moves to conclude public participation. The motion is seconded by Alderman Boisselle. On the motion, all those in favor? Aye. Anyone opposed? Motion passes. Public participation is hereby concluded for this evening.