Public Comment

Transcript (~11 min @ 10:41)

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

▶ 10:40 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: Fair enough.

▶ 10:42 Peter D. Mortimer: Madam President, I make a motion to open the floor for public comment.

▶ 10:46 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: We have a motion made by Alderman Mortimer to open the floor for public comment. Is there a second? Second. Seconded by Alderman Forbes. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? This is the portion of our joint meeting when any member of the public may come forward to speak on the item on our agenda. Are there any members of the public wishing to speak?

▶ 11:12 Speaker 2: Good evening.

▶ 11:12 Speaker 3: Hi, good evening.

▶ 11:14 Speaker 4: I'm Jerry Morose.

▶ 11:19 Speaker 4: have a few comments regarding what the mayor just said number one you know the high school had taken the brunt of underfunding for years and years and years and even the proposed override doesn't begin to offset that you know there were so many things that were rationalized and then accepted as as being fine at the high school we can take away this and take away this and take away this the high school is not at all competently staffed for the benefit of the students you know according to the chapter 70 formula premises you know as I recall middle schools were middle school funding was based on a class size of 25 students per class elementary was based in a class size of 22 students per class and high schools were based on a class size of 17 students per class and the idea is that high schools have to have more specialized classes you're not going to have one class for 25 kids everywhere that you can as you do in the middle school and the the proposed budget doesn't really address that issue very well at all the issue of mixed levels of classes doesn't work for so many kids it's not helpful at the same time at the larger level you know the school committee voted on a budget again this year that I believe isn't meeting the school committee's obligations for establishing policy I've said this in a number of forums over the years but for the school committee to say you know take this many million dollars and give it to the superintendent for personnel and take this many million dollars and give it to the superintendent for everything but personnel that's not establishing any policy the same what you might spend money on but it's not saying what that money is going to do the school committee has an obligation you know there was revenue ruling in 1994 from the DOR that established a school committee has to set its policies it can't defer its obligations or transfer its obligations to anybody else to do that I would hope that the school committee when they consider their budget would go a step further than what they have done and actually say to the superintendent this is what we want to get out of our schools or to fund this application of resources in our schools toward this end and whether you define it by high school or middle school or elementary or by some other metric or something there ought to be some policy expression by the school committee at the same time we have the changing topics the issue of water and sewer yes the mayor is proposing not to increase the volumetric rate this year but that's because we're already over billing the residents of Melrose by more than a million dollars a year and they're just collecting money in the water and sewer retained earnings and reserve funds that reflects that at the same time with all

▶ 14:19 Speaker 4: the money that they've taken in and held we're not doing the ratepayers the water and sewer ratepayers of Melrose any favors by holding that money and not spending it on sewer inflow and infiltration and I remember coming here probably six years ago, and I had a graph that showed that, and I only made the graph be about the Middlesex League towns, but we were at the top of the Middlesex League in how leaky our sewer pipes were, in the idea that sewer pipes that are leaky don't actually leak sewerage into the ground, they typically leak groundwater into the sewer. So as I believe it is today, we are still, actually as I know it is today, we are still the leakiest sewer pipes in the MWRA, and this is a chart that you can't all see, but please accept that the red line at the top is the infiltration and inflow of Melrose biometric that the Water Association uses called gallons per day of leakage per inch diameter mile of sewer pipe. We are far and above more than the average, which is the yellow line here of the MWRA, and please know that the way the MWRA rate structures are set, that this hurts us considerably and one significant rainstorm event a year can put us over the edge to hurt our sewer rates for three full years because they're done on the highest month per year on a three-year average for some of the sewer rate structure. This is unacceptable and the mayor in her in her talk earlier said that you know she's going to use the interest-free funding from the MWRA to work on it, well, guess what? Other communities do that too.

▶ 16:01 Speaker 4: And another aspect of the MWRA rate structure with sewer is that, and with water, is you pay your percentage of the system. And so if we're continuing to use a high percentage of the system relative to everybody else, and then we reduce accordingly with them, we're still at the top of the system. If back in 2013 and 2014 and 2015 we had invested in sewer infiltration and inflow efforts, we would be reaping the rewards of that now and having a lower percentage relative to the rest of the communities and that would help our rate payers. Yes we have some huge problems in our sewer system and yes we can get some large returns on the initial investments, and we've already gotten a few based on the few investments we did back in 2016-17. But the reality is, is that we're taking all kinds of extra money from the rate payers, the city's holding it in the bank, doing nothing with it, and on the water side, we don't have a reason to hold any of that money. We don't even have real large infrastructure that we would have a crisis on at any point in time. We don't have an aquifer to protect. We don't have pumping systems, large-scale pumping systems. We have a couple of small pressure booster systems. We don't have water towers. We don't have a treatment plant. We don't have any of those large things that could fail and cause a problem that would be significant. There's no reason to hold $750,000 in reserve for water every year. Plus, we have, again, all the retained earnings from FY18, and we expect to have a huge retained earnings from FY19. I believe that keeping the volumetric rates the same for water is pretty much, you know, kind of slapping it to the rate payers of Melrose. You've taken way extra money from them. You don't need it. You ought to be giving it back and reducing the water volumetric rates. one other issue about water rates before i move back over to sewer is that the base rates that we have on our water system and our sewer system don't anywhere near reflect the fixed costs of our system and it is a failure of policy to rely so much on a volumetric rate which can fluctuate based on cool and wet summers that that's when we get into trouble and we need to increase our fixed charges and we can lower our volumetric rate you can keep the net cost to people this year even the same or less if you use the money appropriately on the sewer side there is so much money there i would like to see it invested tomorrow in making improvements in the infiltration and inflow and i want to be clear that on inflow there is some benefit to inflow for money but really the people who have sump pumps that are that are connected to the sewer system, it doesn't take money to deal with that. It takes a public relations campaign. And I have asked the city for five, six years now to start a public relations campaign to get people to stop hooking up or to look and see that their sump pump might be connected to the sewer system and to eliminate that. Back in the 1980s when MWRA was starting to build out its system, I managed properties in towns all over here that we were actually asked to do audits of our properties and be sure that we didn't have any connections from roof drains down into into properties that some pumps didn't go there and um everybody but Melrose did those things 30 years ago we still haven't even asked residents or even told residents do you know that you're really not supposed to be having a sump pump go into the sewer system that's one element of inflow and and by the way inflow in our system I believe is about 20 percent of our total um inflow infiltration um the other 80 percent is infiltration itself which is what the investment in sewer pipes can benefit us. A few years back, I had a spreadsheet where I did some analysis, and if we had just reduced our infiltration and inflow by 50%, as I recall, and I will look this up before the next meeting, but that it would have saved us after the three-year averaging period about $667,000 a year on our sewer rates. That's a lot of money that right now we're just giving away the MWRA. And one other piece of data I want to give you, as I recall that this is for the 2017 calendar year, you know, 58% of the water, of the wastewater that we sent to MWRA, 58% did not flow through our sinks and drains and toilets and showers and tubs. 58% of the water came from inflow and infiltration. Now if we want to be green and energy conscious, we should understand that we are wasting huge amounts of resources by letting all that water flow into our system and then to harm the MWRA efforts to remove all the regular sewerage with all that excess water. And when we have large rain events, we are among the worst in the whole area. Thank you for your time. hand this to the clerk so you'll all have that on record but again Melrose is at the top of the list we are two point two seven standard deviations above the norm and this is where the average of the MWRA is thank you thank you mr.