Appropriations & Oversight Committee — 2018-06-07

Appropriations and Oversight Budget Hearing

This meeting starts at 6:20 in a recording that covers several meetings.

Attendance

Manisha Bewtra present · Alderman at Large; Robert A. Boisselle present · Ward 4 Alderman; Scott M. Forbes present · Vice Chair; Jennifer L. Lemmerman present · Chair; Kate Lipper-Garabedian present · Alderman at Large; Shawn M. MacMaster present · Ward 5 Alderman; Monica C. Medeiros present · Alderman at Large; Peter D. Mortimer present · Ward 6 Alderman; John N. Tramontozzi present · Ward 1 Alderman; Francis X. Wright Jr. absent · Ward 3 Alderman; Michael P. Zwirko present · President/ Ex-officio Member

Agenda

Minutes

CITY OF MELROSE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE CALENDAR● JUNE 7, 2018 Aldermanic Chamber, Melrose City Hall Budget Hearing 7:30 PM 562 Main Street, Melrose, MA 02176 The public should take notice that the Melrose Board of Aldermen may, on certain occasions, have a quorum in attendance due to standing committees of the Board of Aldermen consisting of both voting and non-voting members. Members attending this duly posted meeting are participating and deliberating only in conjunction with the business of the standing committee. Attendee Name Title Status Arrived Jennifer L. Lemmerman Chair Present Scott M. Forbes Vice Chair Present Peter D. Mortimer Ward 6 Alderman Present Robert A. Boisselle Ward 4 Alderman Present John N. Tramontozzi Ward 1 Alderman Present Francis X. Wright Jr. Ward 3 Alderman Absent Monica C. Medeiros Alderman at Large Present Michael P. Zwirko President/ Ex-officio Member Present Manisha Bewtra Alderman at Large Present Kate Lipper-Garabedian Alderman at Large Present Shawn M. MacMaster Ward 5 Alderman Present

ORDER-2018-178 Amending Revised Ordinances Proposed FY19 Water Rates Recommend Passage Board of Aldermen

ORDER-2018-177 Amending Revised Ordinances Proposed FY19 Sewer Rates Recommend Passage Board of Aldermen

ORDER-2018-200 Appropriation An Appropriation from Free Cash (01-324001) in the amount of $78,072.00 to Police overtime, (012111-511000). Recommend Passage Board of Aldermen City of Melrose Page 1 Updated 6/11/2018 3:29 PM Minutes Appropriations Committee June 7, 2018

ORDER-2018-201 Transfer A transfer from various accounts as set forth herein, in the amount of $204,376.50 for year end adjustments. Recommend Passage Board of Aldermen

ORDER-2018-187 Bond Authorizing a Bond in the amount of Two Hundred, Seventy Thousand, Two Hundred and Fifty Dollars ($270,250) under the Sewer Enterprise Account through the MWRA Sewer System I/I Local Financial Assistance Program Recommend as Amended Board of Aldermen

ORDER-2018-188 Bond Authorizing a Bond in the amount of One Million, Six Hundred and Eighty Five Thousand Dollars ($1,685,000) to fund roadway, sidewalk and public lot improvement projects. Recommend as Amended Board of Aldermen

ORDER-2018-189 Bond Authorizing a Bond under the Water Enterprise System through MWRA Local Water System Assistance Program bonds for FY2019 in the amount of One Million, Twenty Five Thousand Dollars ($1,025,000) Recommend as Amended Board of Aldermen

ORDER-2018-183 Operating Budgets (City, School, Regional School) City of Melrose Operating Budget for Fiscal Year 2019 in the amount of $79,399,945.73 (Seventy-Nine Million, Three Hundred Ninety-Nine Thousand, Nine Hundred Forty-Five Dollars and Seventy-Three Cents). Recommitted Appropriations Committee

ORDER-2018-184 Enterprise Fund Water Enterprise Operating Budget for Fiscal Year 2019 in the amount of Five Million, Two Hundred Nineteen Thousand, Sixteen Dollars and Sixty Nine Cents ($5,219,016.69). Recommend Passage Board of Aldermen City of Melrose Page 2 Updated 6/11/2018 3:29 PM Minutes Appropriations Committee June 7, 2018

ORDER-2018-185 Enterprise Fund Sewer Enterprise Operating Budget for Fiscal Year 2019 in the amount of Eight Million, Fifty Four Thousand, Thirty Five Dollars and Seventy Three Cents ($8,054,035.73). Recommend Passage Appropriations Committee

ORDER-2018-192 Appropriation An Appropriation from account number 6100-319000 (Water, Retained Earnings) in the amount of $1,793.10 to account number 8416-490000 (Water, Reserve of Retained Earnings). Recommend Passage Board of Aldermen

ORDER-2018-193 Appropriation An Appropriation from account number 6000-319000 (Sewer Retained Earnings) in the amount of $16,287.90 to account 8415-490000 (Sewer Reserve for Retained Earnings). Recommend Passage Board of Aldermen City of Melrose Page 3 Updated 6/11/2018 3:29 PM

Transcript

▶ 6:37 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: Appropriations Committee of the City of Melrose. This meeting is being recorded and broadcast live on MMTV. It is also available for viewing on the City of Melrose website and at the MMTV website. I'm the chair Alderman Lemmerman. I'm joined this evening by committee members Vice Chair Alderman Forbes as well as Alderman Mortimer, Alderman Boisselle, Alderman Tramontozzi, Alderman Medeiros, President Zwirko, Alderman Bewtra, Alderman Lipper-Garabedian, and Alderman McMaster. motion to open the floor for public participation madam chair can we have a motion to open the floor for public comment made by alderman Mortimer seconded by alderman Boycelle all in favor any opposed this is the portion of

▶ 7:18 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: our meeting where any member of the public may come forward to speak to any item on our agenda motion to close public parties excuse me public comment madam chair second motion to close public comment made by alderman Mortimer seconded by alderman Boycelle all in favor any opposed public comment is now closed the first item on our agenda this evening is order 2018-200 and appropriation from free cash zero one three two four zero zero one in the amount of seventy eight thousand seventy two dollars to police overtime zero one two one one one dash five one one zero zero zero motion to suspend the rules that we may hear from Chief Lyle and other appropriate city officials we have a motion to suspend the rules made by Alderman Mortimer second second by

▶ 8:06 Alderman Forbes. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? You're now under suspension of rules. Chief Lyle? Good evening. Good evening. Mr. De La Russo. Good evening. Thank you for being here. Would you like to speak to this item before we move to questions? Certainly. It's a lot of money. Every year the police department, we do our best with our allocation of overtime and there's the unforeseen incidents that occur whether it's an investigation mainly for this year it's injuries and illness that have cost us considerable amount of money as I explained during my budget we have one officer has been out since March of 2017 I have another officer that's been out injured they're both injuries job related and another one since September

▶ 8:58 had a number of other officers that had some serious medical problems with themselves and their families which costs overtime that's pretty much it other than that I looked at our numbers we're all pretty much the same and those were our red flags this is a point of information this will exhaust the free cash in the city for this fiscal year in addition looking to next year we did allocate a hundred thousand dollars more in overtime for the police department for FY 19 so hopefully that will assist in addressing his needs or in the year but particularly for the unforeseen events thank you motion I recommend this order for passage madam chair second we have a motion I recommend for passage made by Alderman Mortimer seconded by Alderman Boisselle on

▶ 9:48 discussion Alderman Forbes yes just a quick question with the $78,000 allocation what does that bring the overtime up to for this fiscal year approximately $500,000 $500,000 thank you thank you thank you thank you madam chair chief just wanted to give give well wishes to the officers who are out of duty right now an injury hopefully they can get well and come back and continue to serve thank you appreciate that Alderman Medeiros thank you and some of the increase in overtime to have to do with the settling of the contract and the that won't impact this year because it's only a few weeks but next year where the supervisors got it you know a 10 10 plus raise that certainly impacts them and annually the patrolman's increase will impact us

▶ 10:40 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: over the course of the year thank you thank you thank you we have a motion to recommend made and seconded all in favor aye aye any opposed this motion will be recommended for passage at the next full board thank you thank you next up we have order 2018-201 a transfer from various accounts as set forth herein in the amount of 204 dollars three three 376 excuse me 204 376 dollars and 50 cents for year-end adjustments and the order does have the various accounts laid out what is the will of the committee can we hear from the appropriate city officials please absolutely is there a particular we have several in here is there anyone in particular you want to bring up first um no why don't we just start with mr della russo just uh we were already in

▶ 11:37 the suspension so yes absolutely mr de la russo if you could join us just to make it completely proper i'll make a motion to recommend this order for passage second motion to recommend for passage made by alderman mortimer seconded by alderman Boisselle on discussion thank you mr de la russo would you like to just speak to this generally to begin or go straight to questions on specific lines um perhaps i'll just uh speak in general and perhaps if the board has questions and specific department heads or letters that were submitted um we can reference that that's the chair as well absolutely thank you on this order here is our as we saw last time with public works this is the rest of this city's year-end housekeeping these are transfers they're not appropriations

▶ 12:25 that means that there's revenue and existing budgets to be transferred to others you're not raising revenue outside of the operating budget so the first one that we see and the total is 204 376.50 it's the fire salary overtime um 163 thousand dollars again the chief is here i can speak to the fact that they've had numerous retirements that were unanticipated overtime matters that uh due to a number of reasons that i think uh perhaps pertain as well to the police department that impacted their overtime this year as again there's a point of information the city did appropriate a hundred thousand dollars more to fire overtime to hopefully address some of those issues on next fiscal year as they surface

▶ 13:22 which they will because of the uncertainty um if there's any questions mr uh fire chief is here do you like to go straight to questions or do you have a statement on this again i could just uh reiterate what uh patrick had said though he had some anticipated unanticipated um absences uh long-term uh sickness we have one member that hasn't worked in over a year and then we had several members avail themselves to the family medical leave act a few minor injuries not that major and then we had by my count seven retirements in this fiscal year and uh five of those will be since april so there's a couple coming up in the next month or two uh next month actually uh and i think i have another one that hasn't made his interest known

▶ 14:32 Shawn M. MacMaster: but it should be looks like about six weeks or so uh that's uh the reason for the uh overtime thank you alderman ford i thank you for being here just the the same question i asked chief lowell do we know how much the uh the overtime on the on the fire department is going to be now for the fiscal year after this transfer thank you with me okay we'll get there yeah if you can provide that that'd be great yeah all right thank you thank you madam chair thank you chief for being here thank you mr delarusso um other than covering uh shifts does the fire overtime uh go to cover anything else for instance um some sort of fire related detail uh there are any other reasons that you would be paying overtime beyond actual coverage of a shift yes uh paramedics we have

▶ 15:32 mandatory training rounds that every other month so it's uh mandatory so the all the medics will come in and those that aren't working are compensated over time and would you pay overtime for back back filling the shift for the officer excuse me for the firefighter who ended up going to the training so you're paying the fire there's no one else to backfill because they all come and the two that are on the ambulance for that shift that they get called out they they uh will miss the remainder of the training we have trained throughout the year so that they're always always up to where they need to be for training purposes thank you chief thank you thank you alderman Letter garabadian thank you both for being here i know that um

▶ 16:24 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: we heard from the police recently that there were three recent hires and i'm wondering given the number of retirements that you've had in the past fiscal year what the status is of filling those positions yes uh right now we're currently in the process of background checking six candidates for uh six positions actually we're looking at seven for the six positions looking at seven candidates people signed with interest for the job okay so the background check those candidates and but there's only six positions and that would that will that mean that you'll have a full staff at that point when so six positions are filled that's once they're on board and academy training that would be bring us up to where we need to be and how long does

▶ 17:09 that process usually take well it's uh i just found out today the academy is uh backlogged nine months get someone to enroll in the Academy to they actually get a job offer and pass the physicals and PIT test that goes with it so should we anticipate that the overtime need for this coming fiscal year will be commiserate with the fact that a number of positions are going to be unfilled for a while for a few months that's would be correct okay thank you thank you we have a motion that's been made and seconded to recommend this order for passage all in favor any opposed this order will be recommended for passage at the next full board meeting thank you thank you the next item in front of us and in fact the

▶ 18:06 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: the next three items in front of us are all we have members of the Department of Public Works with us this evening to address these and I believe the presentation of the three is each related the chair if it's the will of committee would would entertain a motion to join the next three orders for the purposes of discussion and we could separate them later if we wanted to so moved madam chair second we have a motion to join order 2018-187 2018-188 and 2018-189 for the purposes of discussion made by Alderman Mortimer seconded by Alderman Boisselle on discussion. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? We now have the three orders joined. I will read each of them out loud for anyone watching. Order 2018-187, authorizing a bond in the amount of $270,250 under

▶ 19:05 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: the sewer enterprise account through the MWRA Sewer System I&I Local Financial Assistance Program. Order 2018-188, authorizing a bond in the amount of $1,685,000 to fund roadway, sidewalk, and public lot improvement projects. And Order 2018-189, authorizing a bond under the Water Enterprise System through MWRA Local Water System Assistance Program bonds for FY 2019 in the amount of $1,025,000. We are still under suspension of rules. We could invite Mr. Shenna and any other members of his department up. Good evening everyone. Good evening. Ms. has loaded up the presentation on the TV here. Good evening everyone. Thank you for having us here, and thank you for the discussion of these orders together.

▶ 20:42 they do relate to one another and they do relate to the plan that we want to present to everyone this evening melrose has been one of the most aggressive communities in improving their utility and roadway infrastructure at a time with shrinking federal and state aid over the past several decades funded by prior road programs grants and other outside funding sources the city's reconstructed miles of utilities water sewer drain and our roadways and our sidewalks the list is lit is very lengthy and it's very visible as you enter melrose weather from the north the south the east of the west and as you drive through our neighborhoods now most importantly it's evident in our fire flow capacities and our ability to adequately fight

▶ 21:33 fires and our water quality and our water pressure improvements the work in our roadway infrastructure has beautified our neighborhoods it's increased property values or at least helped increase property values it's improved traffic flow pedestrian flow bicycle accommodations now it's reduced roadway hazards emergency roadway repairs and it's made our sidewalks in our neighborhoods safer for children to travel through the roadway improvements coupled with construction of several new parks and athletic fields the construction of new drainage and flooding facilities water and sewer pump stations and pipeline have resulted in dramatic change for the better so tonight we're requesting a commitment from the sport to continue these efforts

▶ 22:27 both this year and next our engineering team is superb and together with the consultants they've worked very diligent diligently over the last few years to create capital infrastructure studies that provide us a roadmap of where to invest when to invest why to invest in how to invest neglecting infrastructure we all know leads to catastrophic emergency repairs and ongoing unfunded more importantly emergency issues we've always partnered with this board and tonight we hope that we could continue to be proactive in supporting our capital programming through the support of the three orders that are before you so last week during our public works hearing I gave a sneak preview of the program by by placing the schedule and a listing of the projects in those orders

▶ 23:25 and we discussed them briefly what I want to do right now is take a step backwards and and turn to the presentation and look at the three the three segments of the program roadway improvements water improvements and a continued aggressive I&I program and how they all come together so the program is outlined in the chat what we've done is we've broken it down into smaller more manageable to the I sections the first section is funding and ongoing if you drive around Melrose today you'll see these projects happening the orders before you do not fund these projects but they're part of the program that we've started this year and they're worth mentioning spare Hancock Street North and South High Albion and Day Street are all entering what we call

▶ 24:21 substantial completion punchless mode that's the landscaping piece tree planting piece of the projects first Street and sixth Street will be completed once school is out because that segment abuts the frontage of the Winthrop school we've completed our cemetery roadway upgrades prior to Memorial Day our inflow and infiltration the program that's funded I'd say is a about 80 complete there's one last contract is about to hit the street for open cut repairs throughout the city francis and bartlett are currently in the design stage we hope to be out in on those streets late summer and the orient dav rain gardens are currently being completed so that's what's funding that's what's ongoing no relevance to the order but worth mentioning

▶ 25:09 now comes to the part that are partially funded you may recognize some of these streets altamont dav perkins and warwick are projects that we've recently completed water work in the water program has funded the curb to curb paving of those projects what the additional funding through the road bond that we're discussing this evening does is allow us to do traffic calming measures allows us to improve the traffic signals at warwick and perkins allows us to add sidewalk on altamont ave something that we have heard from that neighborhood as we're out there improving their water their water system the complete street project the bike lane from north to south the howard the howard ruggles improvements to pedestrian traffic and bicyclists and the

▶ 26:06 improvements we want to make abutting the melrose high school melrose veterans middle school pedestrian access ways they're all funded through our complete street program however we need design support we need some additional funding to make some additional improvements that those neighborhoods want that are not included in the project the road program takes care of these partially funded prod programs and truly makes them holistic to what we're hearing that your neighborhoods want the last section is pending funding so our engineers work very closely with the gas company the gas company has an initiative to improve their gas mains in the community cast iron has to come out it's replaced with plastic what we try to do is mirror their work

▶ 26:57 or merge their work with our work and when we can't do that obviously we have to allow them to make their upgrades for the safety of our neighborhoods however our engineers have created a program where national grid is giving us partial funding to re in some instances to replace the entire road in some instances to replace half the balance is funded through the city it's funded through the order that's before you this evening so woodland ave portions of warwick and warren and franklin i believe there'll be a neighborhood meeting out there next week or within the next couple of weeks the gas company is about to put a transmission main there they will repave portions of the road and the small portions that they don't this order

▶ 27:47 will fund this disorder will also fund some sidewalk improvements in that neighborhood and some traffic calming we've heard from that neighborhood continuously at the traffic commission about the need for safer sidewalks and our city engineer is addressing those issues with the project if we can get some additional funding blueberry hill is a development off of forest street the developer and national grid are making improvements on forest street the improvements will fund the repaving of forestry from lebanon to the development actually lebanon possibly to of the town line so additional funding will take care of everything else in that neighborhood that they don't so this way when we walk away we can walk away with a complete project

▶ 28:35 florence heard stanford street they are our next water program water projects pay for the replacement of the water pipe and the replacement of the road over that water pipe this road program covers everything else sidewalks handicap ramps street streetscape issues back to the gas company vinton street is a project that they seem to be on forever but there were two walk two both a high and a low pressure gas main a six very extensive history of leaks out there and as you if you're ever walking through or driving through that neighborhood even five six o'clock at night when construction is done and the trenches are full you can still smell the odor a very very much needed gas project the gas company is going to repave a significant portion

▶ 29:29 of it this bond will pick up the rest east emerson garfield ashmont those are three projects again we're proposing for water the water bond will cover the water work the road bond will cover the road work dexter road is a project that we committed as a community to there's a development off of dexter road and they are improving their portion and we're going to do the rest from dexter dexter road from that development to swain's pond to complete again complete the neighborhood and our attempts to walk away from neighborhoods completely addressing all of their issues perkins street is a water project that requires some additional paving we were also able to get the gas company to address perkins street from the lindfels parkway to warwick grove that was

▶ 30:29 never part of the original project but again once they got going replacing gas pipe we noticed that the last block had to be replaced as well the strength of the working relationship allowed that to take place the balance of the streets are projects that we will start next year and it includes lower Main Street the lower Main Street is from Mount Vernon to Sylvan Street it's a section of Main Street that is very wide it's a section that is failing but it's a section that's heavily used whether it's people trying to get to Pine Banks commuters trying to get to oak grove or it's just another entrance to into melrose it's the one segment of main street that has not been addressed in the last 12 to 15 years this program addresses it and

▶ 31:18 it's um i think it's our only project on a main collector road but it is definitely needed that will also try to address pedestrian needs during the complete street study that was an area of um marked for bike improvement and pedestrian improvement whether it's handicap ramps or bike accommodations so that will all be tied in together next year on that project so those are the projects how did we select them that i've heard that a lot this is a map of melrose and this is our roadway ranking map so what we did last year coming out of the winter was we excuse me we performed the roadway inventory of all the publicly owned streets in melrose and we did this through gis through people gis our engineers went out with ipads in hand and drove the streets several times

▶ 32:19 back and forth looking for alligator cracking trenches potholes i believe there were 13 parameters that they looked at and they scored each segment of the road using an algorithm in that computer we got an overall ranking and then we grouped the streets by ward into poorest poor fair and good and excellent condition the color-coded map is that blue is good red is poor our engineers are about to launch this onto our website now that it's presented to the board we probably hope we hope to get it online next week so that the alderman and your constituents can go online and see exactly how it is that the methodology that we apply towards ranking roadways so that's how we do it we just don't arbitrarily pick a

▶ 33:18 Street what it results in is projects like this spare Street Hancock Street to the left before to the right and to the bottom after a safe trial a safe sidewalk continuous one side of the street exists today and you can see cleaner edges to the road which helps drainage and berm and grass strip again all safety issues that were addressed north and south high street to the left the before picture to the right what exists out there today recently completed within the last few weeks we worked very closely with this neighborhood this neighborhood was a pleasure to work with extremely extremely unsafe conditions which required out of the box thinking from our engineering group and a lot of cooperation

▶ 34:14 from the residents but it ended up in a product that i believe they're very happy with and which is definitely much improved albion street which is a thorough cut through to the high school heavily traveled and you can see the not only the improvement in the roadway surface but also in the driveway aprons and in the handicap ramps so that's what happens when we invest those are the projects that we listed before the projects add up to 1.65 we're requesting one point six eight five there's a little contingency built in for staffing and some other needs the program also takes into consideration our calendar year 19 that's next year's chapter 90 funding so all in all if this order passes between this year's chapter 90

▶ 35:05 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: our complete streets this year complete streets next year this order we could be investing well over three million dollars in our roadways from the in 2018 and 2019 flipping to water mr. Shana I'm very sorry to cut you off in the middle of your presentation we do have to start a public hearing at 8 p.m. so I'm wondering if this might be a good time where we're in the presentation to do that is that okay yep thank you thank you for your flexibility I'm sorry I have to do that to you now we do have this order before us these three orders conjoined if we want to make a motion a motion has not been made to pat for passage at this point table we don't even just don't need to do anything there's a there is a motion to table the order I think we could we can do with

▶ 36:25 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: that to second motion to table the order to take it back up after the public hearing made by Alderman Medeiros seconded by Alderman Mortimer the joint the conjoined daughters joined orders thank you all in favor all right any opposed we will table that order for taking it up again later motion to commence the public hearing second we have a motion to commence the 8 p.m. public hearing regarding orders 2018 178 proposed FY 19 water rates and order 2018 177 proposed FY 19 sewer rates this is the start of the public portion of the public hearing a member in the chamber who wishes to speak on these orders may come forward introduce yourself state your address and please sign in all in favor of commencing the yeah thank you all in favor of commencing the public portion of the public

▶ 51:43 second we have a motion to close the public hearing made by Alderman Forbes seconded by President Search all in favor aye any opposed public hearing is is now closed motion to remove orders 1 8 7 1 8 8 and 1 8 9 as conjoined earlier this evening from the table we have a motion to remove the conjoined conjoined orders 2018 1 8 7 2018 1 8 8 and 2018 1 8 9 from the table second seconded by was that Alderman Forbes yes seconded by Alderman Forbes on discussion all in favor? Aye. Opposed? We'll now return to the previous presentation by Mr. Shenna and Ms. Porway-Cazales. The first portion of our presentation concentrated on roadway. This middle portion is on water and what I have here is a capital

▶ 52:55 efficiency program. It studied every inch of our water system, every street and every component of it and what it does is look at 3 3 3 evaluations or it looks at every system in three ways from a hydraulic evaluation perspective and asset management and a critical component and when the rings went when the street falls into two of the rings or three of the rings that's how it gets ranked it results in projects like dave street which we just completed that's the pipe on day street um if you zoom in closely you can maybe get this pen through that area but that's the pipe that residents on along day street were living with we can go to the next one there's altamont ave and And you can see, not as bad as Day Street,

▶ 53:52 because there's more volume, but that's horrific, tuberculation in those pipes. This is Warwick Road. On the right is the picture of the existing water main. We had no control over that water main, meaning if there was an issue, we couldn't shut it down. We had to bring in specialized equipment to put an insertion valve in place, so this way we could get proper control, and we can get proper lining and proper volume. What they result in mathematically, without getting into heavy numbers, is improvement in fire flow. On Day Street, we went from 350 to 530 gallons per minute. On Altamont Ave, we went from an average of 275 to 300 gallons a minute to well over 1,000, and in some instances, 1,200 gallons a minute,

▶ 54:46 four times the amount of flow coming out of the hydrant. When we did these a few weeks ago, we couldn't test Perkins, there was still work going on, but look at Warwick Road. That water main that we had no control of, hydrant flows went from 200 to 350, to 1190 to 1250. That's what happens when you invest in the water system. And that's why the order before you will look to improve the water system on Florence Street SEC little pieces of third Street from Florence to Trenton on East Emerson from Stratford to Lincoln and Garfield Road on Ashmont and Ashmont Park the water systems in those areas mirror what you just saw and this this this capital study highlighted that and that's why we're presenting those as our next area

▶ 55:45 to improve the water system on the last order has to do with I&I I'm going to let our city engineer present this they've done an exceptional job Western Samson our city engineer Elena per week to sell us we have a project engineer Scott Dixon who's been working without exaggeration sometimes night and day because he's out doing flow tests at night representing our department They've done a really good job with this program. We're going to backtrack, as we always do with the I&I, tell you what we've been doing, why we've been doing it, and what we're proposing to do moving forward. Thanks, John. And I just want to acknowledge that we have John Potts and Ryan Henley here from Weston and Sampson.

▶ 56:31 They've been our consultants on the ongoing I&I program. They're doing a terrific job, so they are here to support, and if anyone has highly technical questions that they may want to answer, they can do that. So I'm just going to give a quick review of what is I&I. It's something that I think even after we talk about it over and over, there's still sometimes confusion, especially for anybody watching from home. And then what's been accomplished since 2016, and then what we're planning next. So I&I is infiltration and inflow. And this is specific to the sewer system. It's not the drainage system that's collecting rainwater runoff. This is just sanitary sewer that is intended to carry the waste from your homes and from our schools

▶ 57:18 and public buildings and everything else to the MWRI system and off to Deer Island for treatment. Infiltration is groundwater that gets into that system. So sometimes if pipes are in a very wet area, they can be submerged completely in groundwater. A lot of our system is upwards of 100 years old. They're old clay pipes. They have joints every three feet. they have cracks in them you know clay is not something that you expect to withstand over a hundred years of usage so that's how infiltration gets in that's just from the groundwater directly into the pipes inflow is rainfall induced so that's when it's raining if there are holes in a manual cover and the water ponds up on it and it goes into the sewer that way it can

▶ 58:02 be things that are unintentionally or illegally connected to the sewer system So if there's a catch basin in the street, if there's a catch basin grate that's collecting rainwater, and that pipe is inadvertently, or maybe somebody thought it was the right idea at the time when it was done 100 years ago, tied into the sanitary sewer, that's inflow. So when it's raining, that's going into the sewer instead of into the drainage system where it belongs. I also have a reminder here, sump pumps are a big contributor to illegal inflow. it is not legal to have a sump pump in your house that's collecting the water around your foundation or coming in your basement to have that connected to the sewer and that includes when you take the pipe and you throw it into the

▶ 58:47 discharge pipe from your washing machine or when you throw it into the slop sink in your basement that is a legal inflow and that's a major contributor to this problem and people don't think about that they don't they think I'm just making the water go away and they don't think conceptually about the fact that that's going into the sewer and getting sent all the way to Deer Island to be treated and then discharged so MWRA every year does an estimate on how much of our flow is regular sanitary flow and how much is infiltration how much is in flow so the red bars are our sanitary flow you can see that that's pretty consistent it goes up and down a little bit with population estimates and then

▶ 59:28 the infiltration is the yellow that goes up and down with typically how wet of a season we have so you see 2016 is the last bar on the chart there that was the drought year so that's why our I&I was lower that year and similarly inflow will follow rainfall patterns so again in the drought year in 2016 it was lower that's the blue bar and it was lower than had been in previous years but what we want to see is that red bar will tend to stay consistent and we want to see those yellow and blue bars shrinking as we move forward with our program and i didn't mention about set it on that slide and it was mentioned before 50 to 60 percent of our flow in our wastewater system is infiltration and inflow it's not sanitary flow it's not flow that needs to be

▶ 1:00:18 treated it's not flow that needs to be pumped all the way to deer island and then to go through all of their high-tech processes for treatment because it is clean water that should be just staying local in melrose we've taken advantage of all of the mwra loans to date that were available to us that would be 6 million 76 300 we're currently spending the phase 9 and 10 allocations and that was the 2.162 million that was authorized about a year year and a half ago and then the phase 11 money that we're anticipating that we're requesting tonight for fiscal 19 is 1.081 million um with 75 of that being grant money so it makes it extremely advantageous for us to to take that money i've said it over and over but this money is funded

▶ 1:01:11 from the rate payers of mwra so it is our money to take back it's allocated based on our percent share and if we don't use it and it goes someday back into the pool somebody else is just using our grant money and our loan money so we want to take full advantage of this program reviewing what we've been doing in the last couple of years we started in 2016 with flow metering citywide to identify where the highest I and I was coming into the system we identified the top five areas those are the ones listed there 3 7 15 18 and 20 a we started with what's called a sewer system evaluation survey then we've done some manhole rehabilitation some lining of pipelines and we have one project left to do one larger project we have some smaller things to do as well which is to fix anything that

▶ 1:02:04 we couldn't fix with trenchless technologies so that trenchless is the lining that we've been doing or the spraying of cement in the manholes that doesn't involve digging up the street there are some things that just can't be fixed with that technology and we still need to go back and dig up the street so that will be bid this summer so that sanitary sewer evaluation survey included flow isolation that's the work in the middle of the night that john was referring to that's seeing what the infiltration is at times of day when nobody should really be using their water or it's very minimal we cleaned and inspected we we did flow isolation 94 000 feet a pipe clean it inspected another 90,000 with video inspections inspected 540

▶ 1:02:48 manholes did smoke testing this work was done the contractor was inland waters Weston Sampson also did a lot of they did the smoke testing and the manhole inspections in-house and from that information that we gathered we identified thirty three thousand five hundred feet of sewers that were the best technology for them was to line them and so that work is just about done and then they went back and did flow isolation in the middle of the night again to compare what the flows were in those segments of pipe before we line them and after we lined them so these are the results just from the the lining project of that flow isolation there are a lot of numbers here for those interested you can take a real detailed look but I'm going to just give the

▶ 1:03:32 highlights we lined at the time when this chart was made we had lined 186 of the 199 pipe segments that we identified for lining the nighttime flow in just those pipe segments last spring was 592 thousand gallons per day so half a million gallons per day plus in the middle of the night in just these 199 segments once we finished the project we went back to those segments we had a hundred six thousand gallons per day so it's a huge decrease in flow and it's this is considered peak flow so this isn't you wouldn't see that over the whole course of the year but in the spring when infiltration is the highest we're seeing over four hundred thousand gallons per day of removal and then we tried to extend that into what it is for the whole year if you assume that the

▶ 1:04:27 The annual average is half the peak. You get 202,000 gallons per day. If you assume it's 75%, it's 303. But one way or another, it's a lot of flow having been removed for this most recent project. And we also looked at the flow removed, the cost per gallon of that flow removed, just to give a reality check to the I&I mitigation fee that the board approved last year. And the fee is $6.89 per gallon per day. and we're right in that ballpark between my high and low estimates right in the middle so I think we are continuing to charge people the right amount for new development to offset sewer capacity so this is just a nice picture of this is all the flow isolation of all 90,000 feet of pipe before before we did the

▶ 1:05:16 lining and the red is the areas that had the highest flow and those were mostly the areas that were targeted for the removal and this is what it looks like afterwards so the yellow is no flow so there's a lot of areas if you look at the yellow here and toggle back and forth there's a lot of areas that are yellow now that were red or orange before so that means the lining did its job and has removed that nighttime flow and I did a quick cost-benefit analysis for that range of the average annual flow removed for the 202 to 303 thousand gallons per day on average that we remove through this project we save through the MWRI assessments based on how they calculate what they charge us we would be saving between one hundred twelve thousand and one hundred sixty

▶ 1:06:08 eight thousand dollars per year one side note is that MWRI calculates our assessment based on a three-year rolling average so we wouldn't see the full benefit until we get out of all three of the previous years but this is the long-term projection of what this project just now saved us and the total project cost including design and construction was 1.5 million or so meaning it's a payback of about nine to thirteen years if we were paying the full amount but we're only paying 25% so our payback is on the order of two to four years so that's a terrific payback for for this type of project and why we encourage that we that we keep doing these projects so we keep seeing this sort of play back so i mentioned the next step is this open cut sewer rehabilitation project

▶ 1:07:01 we identified about 2 000 feet of pipe that we need to actually excavate and replace and we plan to open bids in july and start construction in august we have about 375 000 left over from the previous allocation to go toward this but this project will cost more than that so that is part of the funding that we're requesting for the next authorization and this just summarizes what our next steps are so that the top half is all the things we still need to do in the areas that we're presently working in and the bottom half is the work we're gonna do in the next areas that we plan to go into based on that flow metering we did a couple years ago these are the next worst areas I do want to stress that the areas that we're working in now

▶ 1:07:47 we're not done we've done the lining piece we've done some manhole lining we have more manhole lining that needs to be done we have the open cup project that needs to be done we also found when we were looking at inflow that immediate rainfall induced inflow 23% of the inflow in the entire city comes from one of our 30 sub areas which is sub area 15 the type of work we've done to date is not really targeting fixing that problem so we're going to try to do some more flow metering within that area to hone in on when it rains where do we see those giant spikes in flow because they have to be coming from somewhere there's got to be something tied in that we didn't pick up in in smoke testing the

▶ 1:08:29 investigations we've done to date so we're gonna keep working in those areas and then we're gonna start in these four new areas 23 13 12 and 19 and we basically just start the whole thing over again it's kind of like Groundhog Day you go into the next area you wake up we do all the same things that we just did for the last two years just in the next area so this shows the purple are the areas that we are working in now and the orange is the new work locations so you can see we're covering a pretty good chunk of the city once we get into these new areas so MWRI will be releasing phases 11 and 12 in fiscal 19 we're just requesting the phase 11 number right now we've estimated this at 1.081 million because mwr has told us that the amounts for phases 11 and 12 at a minimum will

▶ 1:09:26 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: be what they were in previous years in the in phases nine and ten so um we're requesting the 1.081 million once they release the money when we go for the phase 12 money if it's more than we anticipated we can get whatever additional piece is left over so that equates to for the actual loan two hundred seventy thousand two hundred fifty dollars that's the 25 percent of that amount and that's it presentation questions thank you we will now move to questions and comments from the committee one housekeeping portion that I just want to draw the committee's attention to before we enter that phase is in each of these three orders there is an attachment entitled Melrose loan order in iqm2 this is legislative standard language for loans and bonds which we have done

▶ 1:10:25 Peter D. Mortimer: in the past the the amount has not changed where it's going has not changed but these were added today and so we would need to accept these with an amendment should that be the will of the committee since they were added in today alderman mortimer thank you very much chairman Lemmerman just a quick question for the knowledge of the public would you state where area 15 sub area 15 is please sub area 15 is this one the purple area down in the southern portion of the city so it's in the area of swain's pond ave dexter road lebanon street park street yeah it's sort of the hoover school neighborhood and to the south of that and we've traditionally had a problem There was a Facebook site called Melrose back in the day.

▶ 1:11:23 And the cemetery used to have two ponds in it. They were vernal ponds, so I can imagine that area. What would you attribute the problem being on Park Street? Is it not at the top of Park Street? So the cemetery sits just outside the area, and the drainage going in that direction away from sub area 15 so it's most likely not the cemetery we're not sure at this time what's causing that level of inflow so the idea would be when we did the flow metering back in 2016 we had a flow meter at the end the downstream end of each of these sub areas what we're proposing to do now is to go back in the fall and put flow meters throughout just sub area 15 and it's very obvious when you have inflow infiltration is a little harder you have

▶ 1:12:12 to wait for the groundwater to come up and then you see the flows coming up in flow all you need is one rainstorm and you see which flow meters have a spike and then you hone in on that neighborhood and you just get closer and closer so the the smoke testing is intended to find catch basins that are tied in and but what can prevent a catch basin that's tied into the sewer system from smoking when you put that smoke into the sewer is basically like the same sort of trap that you would have the same thing that prevents gases from the sewer from coming into your house where you have a little trap connection your sinks and toilets and everything or your sinks and drains when there's something that keeps water in it if you put smoke in from the vent you're not

▶ 1:12:58 going to see it coming back out of the sink that would be that would be a letter P I'm not trying to be funny the letter P trap a letter P trap or an s trap exactly so I'm not saying about those actual traps but the same concept holds true for something you legally tied into the sewer system so you could have a whole section of drainage system it's tied into the sewer but if there's an area that holds water in between there it acts like a trap and it keeps that smoke when we put it in the sewer from coming back out the drain we use the smoke to try to find these connections but if there's that water dividing it it creates a hermetic seal creates an airtight seal which traps are designed to do yeah so we're so we're gonna have to get into this sub area and

▶ 1:13:44 Scott M. Forbes: just put in meters and find where those flows are coming from thank you very much that's all I have madam chair thank you thank you Alderman Forbes thank you very much I appreciate your presentation kind of disheartening to hear the 50 to sixty percent of the total wastewater that goes in to our lines ends up going into the NWRA for treatment as I and I the question I wanted to have is what about the water leak rate is that still between sixteen to twenty percent of the water that's coming in and hitting that master meter it doesn't actually get to the homes so our leak rate this year was estimated around eleven percent okay we we have a differential between the the water that we pay MWRA for and the

▶ 1:14:30 water that we bill out is around nineteen and a half percent but then we have a lot of uses that we can account for that are not leaks things like when we flush the entire system we just flushed the whole system that uses that uses millions of gallons of water and we're able to account for that because we know how much we float each hydrant things like fighting fires and doing fire training drills or main replacement yeah water main replacement we have to flush lines and bypass pipes where the people aren't paying for the water while the bypass is being used we account for all of those and that brings that number from nineteen and a half down to where we were this past calendar year was around eleven percent of estimated leaks okay or unaccounted for it so it leaks

▶ 1:15:15 Scott M. Forbes: or it's something else it could be metering issues with users who haven't replaced their meters yet do we know what that translates into like gallons per day or is that something that you could possibly get for us I know we talked about it in discussion I just don't I don't remember the actual figure yeah I can't remember our total usage per year okay and then for the areas that were highlighted in red and then after you did the work they were still highlighted in red what are the countermeasures that you're going to take in those sections where it really didn't look like it had much of an effect yeah so those areas that means that either the infiltration was coming in through the sewer services or more likely when when they were out doing the

▶ 1:16:01 nighttime flow isolation post construction they could hear sump pump cycling on and off in some of these areas so that makes us know that in this one sewer segment between one manhole and the next downstream manhole somebody has some pump tied in so narrows it down to you know 10 or 15 homes typically if that sometimes even fewer so we plan to go back to those areas where we could hear the cycling of sump pumps and just go door-to-door and talk to the folks who are there okay encourage them to disconnect whatever they have connected and then I'm just I'm assuming as the work gets done we're continuing to monitor and collect data and other areas of city for the next go-around so we're trying to play chess and go three moves ahead instead of playing checkers and

▶ 1:16:44 fixing as a reactive measure how we did in years past see a lot of overlap between on this next steps slide between finishing up in the areas where we are now and starting in the next areas there's we're gonna keep going with the investigations while we continue to fix the the problems that we're finding and last year we created a master plan of the entire city so we knew where we were gonna slide into next so now that you know it's just the next segment and we we were going to go next after this right so we have we have a big picture and like we're just going to keep on moving down the line yeah and then on the road work box i know we're we're doing all three of these here together the 500 000 that we're requesting from chapter 90 assistance it was

▶ 1:17:30 requested is there any way that that would ever get rejected 525 is what we've what we've received for several years now okay i mean it's a round number i think we got a little more might have been 529 this year when we call it 525 when we always hope to get more we very seldomly get less all right that's a figure we feel comfortable with coming over the figure that we feel comfortable with we receive yeah we received it at least the last four or five years now okay let's see i think that's all i have right now so i will yield thank you thank you This is a great presentation, both of you, and it was really worthwhile reading it. The question, though, came to my mind. You have a lot of these pictures here saying new sidewalks.

▶ 1:18:25 What does a standard new sidewalk consist of? Is it the granite curb and the concrete? Yeah, so what we like to see is granite and concrete. are times when the neighborhood calls for something different south north and south high street it was very difficult over there to install granite and concrete we went with a more flexible pavement to give us a little more a little more play in accommodating the contours spare street the two winners fit that neighborhood there is a part it was a part of spare street that was cement and we we stayed with it and the balance we went with the two minutes so i mean our standard is granite and concrete but there are times we vary and we like to leave those up to the

▶ 1:19:15 we like to leave that decision up to the neighborhood at times i mean it's their neighborhood and there are some neighborhoods that granite and concrete just don't fit and that's when we that's when we come off our standard and defer to the neighborhood so doing this project you had a lot of outreach to the public that's been affected by the construction and so forth how did that go i i have to applaud our engineers again they have neighborhood meetings on site in the neighborhood when the gas company goes out there then again when the water goes up water crew goes out there and then at the end when the road project starts so there are at least three meetings face to face right in their neighborhood we don't inconvenience them and bring

▶ 1:20:01 Robert A. Boisselle: them into city hall or things like that then we follow up with several notices um whether it's during a water project with um we're going to shut your water off we're going to put you on bypass we when can you be home when can we we they do a tremendous job notifying residents and keeping them in tune with what's happening and more importantly what's going to happen next now last week we had a heavy downpour of a lot of rain that came down and so forth streets water was just running uh three or four inches deep in some areas to the drains and so forth now where does that water go once it hits the drain is it counted in this calculation well we have separate drain sewer systems so for the most part i'd say a vast majority of that will

▶ 1:20:52 end up in a storm watershed a drain watershed it could end up in el pond it could end up at the saugus river it could end up at swains or tower i mean there are some cross connections probably out there that's what the smoke testing looks to identify where where you have a catch basin that is connected into the sewer but for the most part it's separate and when we don't when we don't find that to be the case we quickly go out and try to address that and we try to identify it through this program the ini program now when you do one of these streets the infrastructure concerning the water lines do you find lead pipes leading to the home or within the home itself and do you ask if they can change it or do you require it to be changed no that's a

▶ 1:21:39 very good question and again another area where the engineering office has been very aggressive we through our interns we have created a database where the lead where the lead services are both on the city side and on the private side for those who don't know the private side is from the shut off which is typically somewhere in the sidewalk into your home that portion of the water service is owned by the and it's the responsibility of the homeowner the the balance rate lays on the city if we find lead on the inside we let them know we notify them we typically leave a notice and now we also do a certain level of testing right you want to just tell them what typically would happen if we made an upgrade and they found lead on the inside yeah so um any place where

▶ 1:22:27 we've been replacing the water main we're replacing with new copper pipe from the water main to that shutoff box as well as the shutoff box itself if we're replacing if it was already copper in the street and we find lead on the private side we just leave them a notice that says your service is lead and we strongly encourage you to replace it and we tell them a little bit about lead pipes and the effects on drinking water if the pipe in the street that we replaced is lead and we were placing that with copper and then their portion is also lead that's what we call a partial replacement so it's going from a full lead pipe to half copper half lead and that's actually that can actually increase the amount of lead in that customers drinking water for a period of

▶ 1:23:14 time after that replacement and so mass DEP is very concerned about partial replacements so now when we do partial replacements we are required to take a sample before the replacement if our records show that it's going to be a partial and then we flush out the water right after the replacement we take a sample after the replacement and then we're providing a filter a kitchen faucet filter that screws on like a kind of like the Brita ones that screw on to your kitchen faucet but these are made specifically for lead removal with a second extra cartridge cartridge and a letter that instructs the homeowner to please use this for at least six months and then we're also still encouraging them to replace their side so that combination of things has resulted in

▶ 1:24:03 Robert A. Boisselle: quite a few people opting to replace their side is there a program where the homeowner who has the lead piping can get a financial assistance and getting the entire system replaced yeah we don't have anything but MWRA a while back you might have heard that they had a program but all that program was was just our regular loan program that we're already doing and they were just saying that we could extend that to the private property side and some towns own all the way to the house and other towns have opted to replace all the way to the house through that program but it's still just the zero percent interest loan there's no grant money involved in that program do you know what the average charge is to remove that type of piping from the street to the home

▶ 1:24:52 Robert A. Boisselle: itself i usually tell people about three thousand dollars but it it relates very strongly to how far back your house is set from the street and what type of landscaping you have are you going under the driveway are you going under a brick patio set of stairs yeah set of stairs a stone wall some things they can pull the line through but other things require actually repairing those so that can drive the costs up okay you mentioned that national grid or gas company and so forth will give you a certain amount of money for half the street what happens to the other half of the street we finish it with this order all right so the streets that are half done and half potholes and cracking are going to be fixed that's what we want to try to avoid moving forward

▶ 1:25:43 national grid owns the trench and they tell us all the time well you know we all we own as a trench repair under their uh um under their i can't think of the standards utility companies work on them right now but and you know to a certain extent it's true but we try to work together so for several years they were going from the curb out past you know maybe a foot past the trench now we're trying to get them to do a little more a little more and you know we say okay we'll give do the trench here because we're coming but over here you're gonna do the whole road so i'm glad i'm glad we we're approaching it the way we are with them because it's creating a better end product moving forward for the neighborhoods very good again thank you for

▶ 1:26:29 Robert A. Boisselle: the presentation now will this presentation be online under at the website yeah we're going to probably put the whole thing on um but we will put more detail regard to the pavement management program online now is that going to be in your dpw area or is it on the general front page of the website we may put it on both initially may put it on the front page and then you know have its home permanent in the public perfect section perfect again thank you very much thank you for your detailed work thank you thank you alderman Boisselle and of course just to mention um the public can also access this presentation on iqm2 president's workout that was gonna be a little longer thank Thank you Madam Chair.

▶ 1:27:13 Michael P. Zwirko: Thanks for this, very informative and I know that at least with respect to INI, you know this is I believe your third year here Ms. Paracas-Ellis and one of the highlights to hiring you was your previous work on INI and bringing that expertise here. So we're already starting to see the benefits of it and this is very comprehensive and greatly appreciate that. of my questions have already been answered but um i want to push a little further just because i don't think that i under understand fully so i'll start with those um you referred to the orange sections that are going to be the areas that we're going to target next did those come out of in last last year you showed it to us and it's also in some of the materials here

▶ 1:27:58 those those spikes that you talked about so are those areas where the spikes were the highest is that how we're we're kind of going with the highest um pitches so those areas are the the next highest right um and i think when i showed you those graphs last year i think i was showing you spikes for inflow so that would be right when it rains but there's also sort of the the gradual increase as the groundwater comes up and that's infiltration so we have separate rankings for every sub area for inflow and infiltration and then weston samson combined them to create an overall ranking for each sub area so that's how we're picking the orange section because it's primarily the east side it does appear to be primarily yeah uh the other um so you had mentioned um and alderman

▶ 1:28:46 Michael P. Zwirko: forbes brought this up that the areas that we had completed or at least partially completed there were still some red lines and that's likely due to some pumps so how exactly do we enforce that and and a caveat or a coda to that rather do we have um the enforcement ability to go in just like we do with water meters to you know inspect someone's home we do and it all depends on what approach the city chooses to take moving forward mass dep is putting pressure on us because of our high inflow numbers to do some form of both public outreach and house to house inspections so we thought the easiest way to start this house to house inspection program is in these areas where we know somebody has a sump pump tied in and just sort of informally try to work with them

▶ 1:29:36 but the the approach that other towns have taken really runs the gamut between um strict enforcement it is it's illegal by state plumbing code so that makes it very easy to enforce it's not um it's not like we need our own local ordinance saying that it's illegal and i think we even have language in our ordinances saying that it's illegal um but we do have the right to show up at somebody's door say we're going to inspect and then you know charge a fee or say they're in violation of state plumbing code but that's usually not the best way to get people to disconnect their sump pumps some towns will have some sort of an amnesty program where they'll say we're gonna come in and inspect your home and we'll work with you and if you repair it within this

▶ 1:30:25 certain amount of time then we won't find you and we won't take any other action and we'll actually help you design where to put the flow instead of where you have it now some towns use their state revolving fund money or other money to actually pay a portion of the cost they'll say we'll give you you know five hundred dollars a thousand dollars toward your relocation of that sump pump if you do it now and then other towns just say you're on your own and and you know we found the problem and it's up to you to fix it so there's a range of ways to deal with it and i think it's going to need to be a community decision how we want to go forward so it's good to know what we can do i guess my question is what are we doing

▶ 1:31:10 now we're not doing anything and and how big of an issue is the sump pumps in our ini is there a percentage amount that we know is it ballpark 25 of you know the city it's hard to tell um because it gets mixed in when you see it is both when groundwater is high and when you've just had a storm but you see it for several days after a storm so sometimes you can kind of glean that from the data but it's very hard to separate that out um well you know it's a problem they have some numbers but you know it's considerable would that be fair um it in new england it tends to be considerable so i i don't know that we can say that from the data we have right now but it becomes like they become easier to identify once we've gone through

▶ 1:32:00 right because the red will stand out sections we've addressed manholes they've addressed joints they've addressed um man-to-man whole liners and now you're out there in the middle of the night people are sleeping you're still seeing flow it's not raining and you can kind of oh okay wait a minute there's a problem on the street and i think you can see it those are the areas that are still red i mean i guess as we progress through the city those areas are still going to be red we're not going to lose track of them and i think that's something that we can go out and and heavily educate those neighborhoods in hopes that they do the right thing and make their uh make their adjustments i mean but right now we're doing nothing we're working on a brochure

▶ 1:32:41 Michael P. Zwirko: that we might either do as a bill stuffer or a blog post um just starting to educate people something would help you know yeah so that that's going to be our first step and then we are going to do something in the areas where we've been working we have to start something because dep is requiring us they've made it very clear in recent months that they're going to require us to start something yeah i mean i don't i don't want to you know just start knocking on people's doors and barging in their homes i know they're obviously going to be a capital issue here and when people renovate their house if you have plumbing work or electrical work sometimes they rip down a wall and say you know this i can't allow this to exist this way we have to we have

▶ 1:33:21 Michael P. Zwirko: have to fix this it's not up to code so I know that those instances may happen when someone's putting in a new bathroom or or the like but as we're using the funds that are available from the MWRA and you know they're interest-free and they're helpful it's nice to have you know hand-in-hand enforcement on our side and if we're not doing anything I just feel that we're you know literally letting money just leak through the system so something would be better than nothing and if there's something that we as the board could help in that area we would I think like to be a part of that conversation so the other two questions are related to the capital program you had mentioned the Dexter Road area is

▶ 1:34:11 Michael P. Zwirko: going to be redone the road I think I remember from when the development was going through will there be sidewalks that are added to that street it does okay and the main to Sylvan section so that's as you noted a very wide portion and studies have shown the narrower the road the more traffic calming it can be that that section of Main Street can certainly get traffic up to 40 miles an hour at times. And furthermore, right at the junction of Maine and Sylvan, it's wide enough for two lanes, but it's not striped for two lanes. But MBTA buses and folks turning left onto Sylvan when they're heading south, et cetera, you know where I'm going with this. It turns into two lanes naturally. So I think that there's a benefit if we are going to repave, if there's going to be

▶ 1:35:07 Michael P. Zwirko: some significant striping. We could even have dedicated, as opposed to sharrows, we could actually it's I believe it's wide enough for dedicated bike lane and and still on street parking I would like to see some safety improvements there I don't know if there's a plan to make a left turn only or two lanes towards that intersection or if striping is gonna make it dedicated to one but right now it's used as two and it's and it's not so that's all in the works it's all in the narrative of the scope we're not gonna move the curb that cost isn't in there yeah but the cost to pay from curb to curb and then to restripe it and obviously when we restripe it we're going to look at lane width we're going to look at traffic safety bike

▶ 1:35:49 accommodations parking all of that comes into play but we are going that we we are going to look at those type of issues and try to you know take that really wide section of road especially at night and narrow it down it has to be like the widest section of road in the city right probably probably yeah when we submitted it for complete streets in our prioritization plan we referred to that as a road diet area so where you would break the road down and try to slim the waistline this is for different uses yeah so um ideally if we can get dedicated bike lanes that would be terrific but that'll remain to be seen when we get into the details sure well and i look forward to that and it's just been something i mean it's i live in that area so i'm probably a little bit

▶ 1:36:31 Michael P. Zwirko: more familiar with it but um i i appreciate all this work and again um great improvements looking at those gallons of flows and all the work that's been done especially with our consultants thank you for it it doesn't go unnoticed and i know it's um the the difficulty with with all this stuff is that as you know it's under the road so it's not if you know you just can't throw money at it it's it's it's human resources it's time it's as much as we would like to accelerate this program it does take years especially when you're dealing with an agent system like ours so it's it's appreciated those are all the questions I had at this time Thank You madam chair I think I know we'll all get all get

▶ 1:37:20 called on eventually but thank you thank you you may have already mentioned this but I may have missed it but how long would will it take to complete the I&I work if we're kind of assuming we're keeping on kind of the pace we're at the easiest answer is never so I and I work is something that will probably always be done at the pace we're going we have 30 sub areas if we're doing five sub four to five sub areas every two or so years so 12 15 years but but i think even that's you know that's ambitious you do reach a point though eventually where you've tackled all the major problems and it no longer becomes cost effective to fix you know to spend a million dollars to line a pipe that only has a couple small leaks becomes far cheaper to just send that

▶ 1:38:25 Manisha Bewtra: water from those couple small leaks off to the mwra so um maybe in 12 years we'll reach that that tipping point i think that answered my second question which is how long do the improvements um typically last so it's effectively just kind of an ongoing like the the lining is said to last um 25 or so years but that's also with the caveat that this type of lining hasn't been around for more than probably 30 40 years so you know a lot of it is sort of untested so there they give a pretty conservative estimate on how long liners will last but maybe the last 50 years maybe the last 75 years that remains to be seen hopefully they do my other questions were I guess back to sidewalks so you You mentioned that neighborhoods can have a voice in what materials are used.

▶ 1:39:25 Manisha Bewtra: Can you expand on that a little bit, and also the pros and cons of various different types of materials, and the extent to which ... I mean, sidewalks are also a way of connecting different neighborhoods to each other, and I know North and South High Street are fairly isolated and dexter road is isolated but relatively in terms of cross traffic but um sidewalks are a way to get around the city so i guess just the to the extent the general public or broader community can weigh in when it might be a path that you know gets them to their own house in the next neighborhood over yeah that's a discussion we always have especially in areas that don't have sidewalks but our preference is cement and granite and that's what we push for

▶ 1:40:14 at the end of the day if we get a lot of pushback we may give in if if uh especially if the engineering kind of it makes it easier on the engineering like north and south high but for the most part that is what we that is what we fund that's what we estimate estimating that's what we that's what we initially present granted and cement in as many areas as we can that's the consistent look we want to try to create throughout the community in terms of connectivity the complete street program did a great job looking at that and we have map shows where there are sidewalks whether or not sidewalks spare and hancock street was one of those areas where we really wanted a sidewalk because there's a complete street project that will connect what

▶ 1:40:59 we just built to the school so we're looking at that that complete street program has really helped us look at okay well how are we going to get everybody around um so we do look at those type of things and that's what kind of and that's the selling point because there are a lot of people they don't have a sidewalk today and they don't want a sidewalk but we tell them that it's it's not their property it's not their frontage and and part of the reason we put sidewalks is so that we can get people from place to place and it tends to work now it tends to work with um allowing us in to make those improvements we've had overwhelming support in the neighborhoods that we've added sidewalks to maybe one or two people who complained in the rest of the

▶ 1:41:43 neighborhood very happy with with the outcome and one thing i want to add about granite curbs while they are always our preference um there are situations when there's ledge in the ground and you know we only see six inches of the curb but granite curbs are 18 inches typically deep and it's extremely cost prohibitive to blast to put in granite curb so spear street was one of those situations where when the gas company came through and did their piping they hit a lot of ledge they did a lot of hammering of ledge to get the gas main in we're not going to blast and hammer ledge to put a curb if you know if we can put a burn and it suits the neighborhood great well and i don't remember if i expressed my appreciation for this at the last meeting but as a winthrop

▶ 1:42:32 Monica C. Medeiros: parent who always goes on that little section of sixth street i i heard complaints about it on a daily basis so i was thrilled to see the work being done and really excited about the work that will be done over the next uh couple months before school starts so thank you for that those are all my questions thank you alderman medeiros thank you thank you very much um sticking on the sidewalks and what I wanted to ask is a little bit about green space and the green patches on this the you know what are the benefits and what are you know are we trying to add those where they don't exist and or or not and you know maybe in terms of Main Street how does that work versus well we're a neighborhood as we always try to add up because it's curb appeal it's nice to drive

▶ 1:43:24 Monica C. Medeiros: down that road see that green grass strip it's a great spot it's a great place to plant the tree the more commercial collector roads we may not go that route and sometimes the width of the sidewalk doesn't allow us to go that route but for the most part an 18 to 24 inch grass strip is what we like to put in and again it softens the look of of that sidewalk it gives us an opportunity to plant grass and they're usually well received and imagine it improves drainage significantly even though it's just a little bit of space i was happy to see the north and south high street i think had a little little strip yeah but enough to make it look neighborhood like um and in terms of uh if trees if they have to come down in this process i think we talked a

▶ 1:44:16 little bit about this the other night are we are we planting new trees or if they have to come down they do we do plant new trees and we plant more than we take down sometimes we'll just plant even if we don't take down and we always try to work around the tree if it's healthy if if it's not they come down if construction is going to damage it and we really can't make it work we'll take it down we always post it to see how the neighborhood feels about it in case that somebody missed the meeting or didn't know what we were doing so that's what we do with the trees and on those roads and is that included like the replacement cost would that be included out of this bonding rather than a separate tree no it's all in the project costs um i was hoping uh miss

▶ 1:45:02 Monica C. Medeiros: paracas ellis if you could kind of go back over the cost savings again um on the cost benefit yes analysis and so if it was full cost so we're we're planning to this is the million 81 i want to say it is uh the cost benefit analysis was based on the immediate most recent project just the lining project just the lining project so not what's actually uh in front of us tonight but what has already passed okay so that project the full cost that project was the one million five hundred fifty one thousand that we've already approved and spent and so you're saying that if if we paid the entire cost ourselves it would have taken somewhere between nine and fourteen years to pay back what's the the length of the loan on that ten years ten years and but in fact we got a grant

▶ 1:46:06 Monica C. Medeiros: of 75 and we only borrowed 25 at no cost and it it's going to take us only at the max it looks like 3.4 years to to pay that back so you know i just want to say that you know don't always love to spend money but i think this is money well spent i'm going to support these orders i think it's you know so important that we get a handle on the water that's you know basically just going down the drain for our real drain I think you know it's very encouraging to see the difference between the nighttime flows in in terms of the storm drains I mean you are if you do find somebody that has a stunt an illegal connection we are alerting them that they have it yes well so far we only have been able to narrow down to we know what pipe segment it's coming into but we don't

▶ 1:47:05 Monica C. Medeiros: know specifically which house it's coming from they just they can tell by seeing flow that's cycling keeps coming on and they can sometimes even hear sort of the sound of the discharge i do believe we have in some clean water legislation that we passed many many years ago go on this board I do believe it's there and I do hope that you know at least when we are able to narrow it down that at least we are alerting the homeowner as soon as possible and kind of take the rest from there is there a way and I guess if we were to move forward on that in the future it would be great to to know what the cost is for an illegal sump pump connection like what it what is what are we losing or the rape you know the city and the ratepayers by

▶ 1:48:14 having that connection does that are we able to put that into a dollars to say that you know if we were to offer some kind of program to help homeowners fix it that would be saving money you know I don't I don't know if that is the case or not yeah I could certainly do the same analysis you know we're looking at two hundred two to three hundred three thousand gallons per day of removal from our overall program this will be more on the scale of per day or something you know it's gonna be a much smaller scale and so the numbers might be tiny on an individual house basis but it's certainly a number that i can come up with from the spreadsheet i have thank you and uh yes thank you thank you alderman mcmaster thank you madam chair thank

▶ 1:49:04 Shawn M. MacMaster: you both for a very substantive presentation for the partially funded projects that are part of the complete grants program you talked about various types of design assistance work traffic calming measures sidewalks are these needs that weren't anticipated at the time that the projects began did they come up based on your conversations with with residents no good design did design costs and and it's some additional costs i anticipate it's not a lot of funding we're putting in to to that to cover that to cover those three projects but it also gives us the capability either expand those project or even to address some other little complete street needs um i think the almond mentioned before about sixth street it's not a three billion dollar project it was

▶ 1:49:56 a little need we were able to do it with the budget middle and it makes a huge impact a lot of people you know i think we've set aside 60 000 to add to our complete streets i think we're getting about 350 000 so it's a small percentage of what we're getting for construction and it it gives us a little flexibility to make things happen but more importantly to design and the majority of that will probably go to howard street so that we can listen to that neighborhood hear what they want hear what their needs are and come up with with a design that that suits the needs in the case of complete streets design funding doesn't qualify for the grant so that's why that's separate and then on the other streets um for instance on altamont ave

▶ 1:50:43 and warwick and perkins where we're talking about sidewalks and traffic coming those weren't included in the initial allocation because we allocated um those are streets where we did the water project and we have a water bond that's paying for the paving of those streets but we can't pay for sidewalks with the water bond we can't pay for traffic signals with the water bond so that's why these are separate costs so they were always anticipated but they just weren't able to be included in the other funding requests so the design assistance work is 60 000 is really just a fraction of the bond yeah that the um on the complete streets the uh total grant is 377 000. and that's one year we hope to apply again and this is a two-year bond so that's the our thinking

▶ 1:51:30 as well very good um with respect to the national grid gas work um that will be done on ashmont street in ashmont park can you just talk a little bit about that so uh that's a street that has an old cast iron gas main every time every year we meet with national grid and we're in constant communication with them throughout the year but each year we try to meet with them one holistic meeting with their engineering group and their construction group where we go through what streets we want to do water main work on and then they review those streets for whether or not they need gas work and then similarly they give us a list of streets where they have the highest priority for gas work and we look at our records and see if we need to do water work or if we need

▶ 1:52:15 to pave um and that's how we established the complete list of streets that national grid's going to work on in the city each year and ashmont street national park were a street that we actually identified because of the roadway ranking that that was an area that was in dire need of paving so we suggested to national grid that they look at their records they came back and said yes we do need to do gas work we also looked at our capital efficiency plan for water and that also said yes we need to do water work so we said this is a good street then to do all three right in a row so it's a strategic collaborative effort to get two projects done that need to be done uh ashmont's i think gonna get three right sewer two open cut oh yes

▶ 1:52:58 there was one open cut section of sewer yeah there's a nice diet for ashmore street all three utilities um and my final question is uh for the 50 percent moving on to sewer the 50 percent uh being inflow and infiltration how is it determined by the mwra what is ini and what is actually wastewater how how do they figure that out so the mwra has an extensive um what they call skeda system which is supervisory data acquisition supervisory control and data acquisition system which is a computerized system that all of their flow meters tie into from all the different cities and towns so the flow metering that we did with those 30 flow meters that we put out in 2016 that was us putting these temporary meters in the ground with a consultant and they were

▶ 1:53:49 gathering that data the MWRA being the size that it is they have meters that take readings every 30 seconds in all of these locations and they've sent us before we can get the data for everything leaving the city in 15 minute increments they've sent us spreadsheets with that when we've needed it so that data collection is constant on the mwra's part and so they know what's coming into melrose from the towns where our transmission mains come in or our collection interceptors come in they know how much is leaving Melrose and they look at the differential on a practically second by second basis they can subtract the data out from one to the other and then they do exactly the same analysis that we just did with our flow metering data to rank all of our

▶ 1:54:41 systems they just do it on a bigger scale they rank all the towns all the cities and towns that tie in and they're able to come up with estimates they They look at, they correlate it with rainfall data to figure out which percentage they think is inflow. They correlate it with nighttime, you know, nighttime groundwater flows to say which percentage they think is infiltration. And then they look at our population and do a per capita estimate for how much they think is reasonably domestic wastewater flow. Thank you very much. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. Alderman Lipper-Garabedian for the first time. Following up, thank you. thank you both for being here and for all this information and following up on alderman mcmaster's

▶ 1:55:21 question um do you have a sense of what uh other towns and cities uh rates are for infiltration and flow if we're 50 to 60 which is pretty high how does that compare to others in the system we are in the so on a percentage basis there are quite a few communities who are in our same ballpark They also do a calculation where they take the total infiltration inflow and they divide it by the size of your system and When you look at it that way we tend to to get closer to the top. I think in 2016 Which is the most recent data they have? I think we were second in Infiltration and we were eighth in inflow For the size of our system. I think looking at just volume we were 15 to 20 range out of the 43 communities and then just a couple questions about

▶ 1:56:25 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: the road work that we're doing which is really great I appreciate it in this presentation that we have a map of the places where the infiltration and inflow work is going on is there a similar map somewhere where we you've got the table that shows all the different streets and so we can timeline we might be helpful yeah we can create that we can distribute it and post it people might just like to see you know the spread and the breadth of the work going on visually in that way I would I know you mentioned also there's a sidewalk mapping that's been done and that's I'm presuming that's online somewhere and I think I've seen it here and I'm packet before I know reviews it before and again if that's something that's not online something we can add to the

▶ 1:57:11 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: website too okay that would be great just all of this information that you've got here or that you you're willing to think about putting together maybe at some point there could even be a way that the public could there be sort of like a database where you could type in your street and it would ping back to you any work that is anticipated by your department at some point in time because certainly you know walking around the city people talk a lot about their concerns with their sidewalks or their roads and such and having a sense of it being on your radar is I think it definitely is and so then having that sense of confidence would be great it's a great comment and it's something that the engineering office has really worked on through the GIS I think today they

▶ 1:58:03 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: were all collecting data on street signs today we're all collecting data on street signs and again the thing is to create the map and to make the map interactive whether you click on a sign that tells you what it is or you click on a road and I think our new our new roads even tell you who construct who reconstructed them the contractors that worked on it so that's something we're not there yet but it is something we're collecting data on so that we can get there someday it's just there's clearly a lot of intentionality and thoughtfulness going into all of the work and it's you've got it sort of planned out into the future in a really deliberative way so for the public to be able to find kind of access that in one place will be really helpful I think and

▶ 1:58:47 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: then just one thing that I know we've talked about offline or online rather is the McCarthy apartments so they are presumably part of the Complete Streets section of Main Street that's being identified for the spike path and perhaps part of that additional design and tinkering money that you're asking for can address the crosswalk that's there so that's a senior sort of living environment a number of folks who I've met with are and wheelchairs and the crosswalk actually ends us on one side with a ledge to get up so I'm hopeful that we can address that as part of these overall these overall projects we it's also been flagged in the Melrose high school middle school pedestrian improvements because we get a lot of kids that come out of board to and like

▶ 1:59:41 Michael P. Zwirko: to cross there and through the parking lot so that's definitely gonna be addressed one with one project or the other kind of in the middle of through all three it's great it'll get done I'm really glad to hear that thank you and thank you both again for being here thank you yes it's really just a point board or a question if before we make a vote on the disposition of these orders are we gonna have to break out the one that is pertains to the streets would we keep the two for the water and sewer together and then break out the one for the street reminder that we also do have attachments that we would need to accept by amendment if we were to move if we were to okay that was my question motion I recommend the conjoined orders for passage we have a motion to

▶ 2:00:28 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: recommend for passage all three orders without the addition of the amendment without the what the addition without the acceptance of the amending by accepting the additional attachments that were added to it with the before I make that motion that I'm glad it wasn't seconded I make a motion to amend the order to include the additional attachments that were dispersed today We have a motion to amend the three orders 2018-187, 2018-188, and 2018-189 to accept the Melrose Loan Order documents that were added today, seconded by Alderman Boycelle on discussion. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion to recommend for passage the three conjoined orders as amended. Second. The motion to recommend for passage the three orders as amended, made by Alderman Mortimer,

▶ 2:01:16 Peter D. Mortimer: seconded by Alderman Boycelle on discussion. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? This will be recommended for passage, thank you. Alderman Mortimer. Point of personal privilege, Madam Chair. If I'm incorrect on this, please do correct me, obviously. I think the last order we have for Chief Lyle is the budget on parking. That's true. And I was wondering if I could make a motion to change our order of business, that's all he has if we could conclude this long night for him at least because it seems like everybody else has a a lot of questions before it's a good point and actually I'm not sure that we even need a motion since it's next up and we'll make sure to take that department first you're right it's in the bottom of

▶ 2:02:04 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: the list but if we can take that first thank you for pointing that out thank you very much order 2018-183 City of Melrose operating budget for fiscal year 2019 in the amount of 79 million three hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred forty five dollars and seventy three cents we have several department budget items in front of us and as just discussed we will take number 296 the parking budget first in the amount of eighty eight thousand six hundred ninety six dollars and eighty eight cents um as we have representatives from the police department we have chief lyle and we also have mr flavin with us both come forward thank you thank you very much thank you for your patience is there an opening statement either of you would like to make on this item or should we

▶ 2:02:56 move directly to questions um i just now that it's out of order i have to find the um parking's kind of an odd duck in this world and that it's there's three people the street involves parts of it as i said in my questionnaire we're in charge of the my office is in charge of the administration the ticket collecting the adjudication the hearings that end of it the chief is in charge of enforcement and this in the parking commission is in charge of policy so policy is not going to be part of tonight's discussion this is what you see in front of you is the budget we need to do our jobs and to and to pay our guys you know people to support that program in the last year we've expanded the program from one day to five days we've gone to merchant parking we're selling

▶ 2:03:49 more stickers we're creating more revenue the chief is writing while these guys are writing tickets and this is represents the money we need to do what we need to do thank you straight to question thank you seems like it wasn't that long ago but maybe it was a little bit longer ago than I thought we had allocated some additional staff member part-time to to address this budget in my understanding at the time was that going to be somewhat of a temporary thing until when you look at it we have when you combine it with my budget we have a new we have a staff person more I'm more professional but he's able to do more charging one day of one unit of her salary one week one day to parking one day general fund and three days for

▶ 2:04:58 water and sewer she started as three days in water and sewer to support the monthly billing so that position is becoming full-time we can discuss that under the other issue but parking if you look at the salaries there's not that much of a difference um so i don't um that's the answer you don't know and yes at that time it was uh she essentially became the parking clerk and while she's a full-time employee provides parking support to the public and hearings five days a week i mean it's certainly a helpful service to the public uh it is something that i you know i think when we made that transfer over it was under the understanding it would not be a benefited position so that seems like it's changed over time here um i did mention to i know there's

▶ 2:05:59 certain certainly huge changes in the parking program including the merchant merchant parking this is something that we don't really offer online but i hope that we can look at that service what the parking parking permit stickers or like i said we're the administration part of it the parking commission and the planning department give us our material and what we provide and what we put out there so that would be an issue to take up with them okay thank you thank you thank you motion to recommend this budget for passage madam chair second a motion to move the bottom line made by alderman mortimer seconded by autumn poysel discussion all in favor aye aye any opposed thank you we'll move the bottom line forward

▶ 2:06:48 thank you chief lyle for thank you for your patience this evening we will move back to the top of our list with department number 145 treasurer good night Good night, in the amount of $426,120.81. Again, I hope you all read the questionnaire. That tells you what we do. I say it every year, and I heard the word earlier today, it's Groundhog Day. These are the resources I need to do my job the way we've been doing our job going forward. We are seeing an uptick in the amount of service that we provide to the customers, especially with the added parking, especially with the monthly water bills. And that's why we're going in the direction of funding. One day, we're funding three, the three water sewer days are staying the same

▶ 2:07:47 for that new position. It wasn't a new position, I gotta make that clear. In 2006, I came here. In 2008, we went through a crisis. And I foolishly, being dumb, allowed that position to go away. And we created a vacuum in our office. And it was an empty hole that the women in my office for the last, how many years now, have backfilled. And now we're kind of facing a crisis as we move on. The amount of weekdays we have, I'm sorry, vacation days that have to get covered. We can't allow them to both take vacation on the same day. It's unfair, they've done service for 10 or 12 years. We need another body in there. We need some support for them. And the decision to create this position and make it full time,

▶ 2:08:38 and it's kind of a jack of all trades, a Brock Holt for your baseball fans, somebody that can fill a number of positions and is younger and more technically, that was probably, I didn't mean younger, but she's more technically adept at handling the situations able to guide me and the staff with it so that's the reasoning besides moving that position from the three-day water and sewer only to a full-time position one day supported by the general fund one day supported by parking and three days supported by water and sewer thank you alderman forbes thank you uh just a quick question regarding the monthly billing i know during our meetings i think we said that monthly billing is up to i think seven percent

▶ 2:09:24 The time that you're spending in your office to only do 7%, is that something that you see viable if it doesn't pick up? Well, if 700 people go over, that used to be 2,800 bills. You do that times 12, what number is that that we have to deal and process every month? Right. It's another eight iterations, so it's not just 700 people. Understood. So it's that number. Whenever somebody changes, you're giving me eight more bills to deal with on a monthly basis. right and eight more questions and eight more payments and eight more transactions that have to go in and out of the systems reconciled and posted so it's it whether it's 710 I don't know what the appetite is going to be for it as it goes out there and builds more but it certainly has had an impact when you

▶ 2:10:15 Scott M. Forbes: look at the questionnaire I gave you water and sewer you know there's a talk of indirects against the treasurer's office if you look at that chart who's my biggest customer water and sewer I mean that's where we do most of our work right most of our transactions not most of our work but it's there so I mean it's not made out no and I don't think it is it's only gonna grow my question just for you is if you're if you're spending and dedicating this much time effort and resources now it's just at 7% if you see an uptick you may be needing more positions there in order to backfill any additional work that comes your way no I hope not I mean it's it's what it's done it's created pressure when somebody's waiting on a customer on this end I needed another body for the

▶ 2:10:58 person in line or the phone ringing while this one's at lunch or this one's on vacation we sure needed the support in the background to maintain the customer service that the previous administration in this administration like our office to provide we could let things go to hold we could not do this But I think we we have much more pride in our office and what we do on that level that we want to continue to provide White glove service is what we consider it. Yeah, I just know it as we rolled out this project This was something that you had to take on in addition to The actual work of the treasurer's office in itself the work that you already do frankly. I'm glad it's rolling. It's rolling out slowly

▶ 2:11:35 I mean, it's I'm glad it didn't just hit us like a ton of bricks and that would have been a whole different situation Yeah, phasing out was definitely but i think the younger homeowners and whatever will probably get more in tune with it especially with we made our change to city hall systems um it's a much better online bill payment system it allows you to see previous bills it allows auto pay um you know it'll just pay the bill for you if it shows up monthly so people might want to take advantage of that right well thank thank you for being here tonight thank you thank you thank you I guess sticking with the monthly billing and this is something we should probably talk about in water and sewer also but you know it's it's crossed my mind you

▶ 2:12:22 Monica C. Medeiros: know I did have some concerns about switching to monthly and adding this extra cost perhaps it's something where we could and I guess I'd like to hear your thoughts on it again not necessarily tonight but the idea of maybe allowing estimated payments but only billing quarterly it would that be more complicated we already do that I mean we'll work with any customer what they want to do they just have to contact I mean they could say we'll never turn money away you know you want to give me $100 a month and you fall behind you're still gonna pay the same interest and penalties that are required by law if you get ahead I mean you can look at it we're still going to mail you a bill that will tell you where you stand so I mean we're willing to work

▶ 2:13:07 with anybody we have a number of people on payment plans already so those that's already there and like I said the auto pay is probably the best option for people go to monthly and go to auto pay and you don't have to worry about it but that's personal decisions on their end in your questionnaire you have the numbers from 2017 is that is that FY 17 or is that calendar and how does that compare to the previous year number I didn't do that yeah I mean I'm just I mean it's groundhog day I mean a lot of numbers that we didn't build more houses we didn't have more water and sewer accounts except for the monthly showing up and we knew that was about seven or eight hundred same personal property same motor vehicles it's about twenty five thousand it's a repetitive business

▶ 2:14:03 but we added the parking and we added the monthly billing and frankly we were in my opinion we were understaffed for a number of years anyways and I think you mentioned that you undertook 42 tax title pursuits does that mean that you just started procedures no no so did we actually take 42 only if you're really bad no it's it's it's unfortunately it's a it's a misnomer when you do it taking all you're doing is securing the lien on the property but we really don't want to take your house but if you don't pay for three or four years and you always 30 or 40 grand we'll start to pursue it in foreclosure and people clean it up and that's what that number represents is the people that are getting because

▶ 2:14:51 they're not doing themselves any favor they're paying 16% interest and it's just going to get worse and worse so after two or three years and the number gets to a certain number we use our lawyers and we push them through land court with the foreclosure proceeding we really in my 11 years here we've had two and they were both kind of abandoned properties yeah and again we have a cycle where we do that like we'll go after the we move perfecting the lien a delinquent tax is good for three years after three years you have to go to land court and file a piece of paper that says it's a tax taking so you file the tax taking now forever when somebody goes to convey that property they come back to us and say what do they owe and get our money

▶ 2:15:41 But it's the best working money we have, it's 16 percent. So I guess that's another question that I've, I've had a lot of this lately where people are asking me what, what happens to our money when we've, we've got the, you know, you know. No again in the, in the, in the questionnaire I referred to, I'm talking about investments. In the questionnaire, I referred to the Mass General Laws that I'm bound to. I'm a certified treasurer collector. The whole way we do anything with any of our money, it's safety first, liquidity second, and then yield. We're not chasing yield, especially in this environment. Things are starting to creep up. We're position barred. But we utilize the state treasurer's MMDT pool fund.

▶ 2:16:35 that goes against a little bit against my liquidity piece because they use commercial paper and they won't allow other investment vehicles with other banks to use commercial paper it's kind of a cheat and it allows them give them a hit head up on on banks and if you go through the laws and you go in I have a formal investment policies for general fund trust funds in OPEC and they follow of all of this safety liquidity yield you can't go out more than a year you can't go to a bank outside of Massachusetts FDIC the safety part of it you can't hold more than 250 in a bag so the strategy I mean and you have this in liquidity is the second one I just wrote eight million dollars in payrolls in the

▶ 2:17:23 Monica C. Medeiros: last two days you have to be able to get at the money too so it has to be liquid and frankly there's no money out there there's somebody getting 30 or 40 basis point but so how do we handle something like I mean if if we have say the money that's in the account for honestly for payroll but I mean we have you know reserve funds or we get cash flow in from you know are we collecting any interest on that when it's collecting what's available yeah so it mean it's it's all it's all in a bank it's all so like you know like this twelve million dollars in an MMDT account. Like the private banks that you know we see as consumers we see like point zero five percent interest or something you know are we talking any kind of serious money that we get an interest or is it really

▶ 2:18:13 you see something great and then again I can't put more than two hundred and fifty thousand of it in the bank without worrying about FDIC insurance I'm not doing my job. When I came, I'm going to go back to 2008, or 2006 actually, everything was hunky-dory and everybody in the trust funds was invested in the legal list or outside of the legal list and the market fell apart and principal went away and that's the decision then is safety, liquidity, and yield. There's nothing sexy about this job. If it was sexy, you'd be paying me more money to to make that kind of money it's not wall street you know it's my job is to collect the money protect the money and pay the money how do we we choose the bank if we can only have 250 000

▶ 2:19:02 Monica C. Medeiros: according to my investment policy so we have relationships we've had long-standing relationships with eastern bank um they're our process of banks century bank mmdt is an investment and that's i I mean, other ones we may do for the local branches, you know, for operations, for tax payments, we use one bank, we keep some money in there. And for the local co-ops and stuff, we might give them a small CD, but there's nothing. Nothing much. And so if we have something like we're gonna see later on, you know, we have, say, money in reserves and water or sewer or something like that, does the interest on that money stay in water sewer does it come back to the general fund how does no it's pooled money everything's pooled

▶ 2:19:50 everything's pulled okay i mean it would cost you a lot of money to separate the water and sewer money to go out into it it would cost you more to go separate it out and create a separate collection area a separate bank a separate how are you going to get that okay you do all that you're going to see you have to pay people and have a separate office so it's mostly it's not i'm talking 30 basis points do the math on on a million dollars it's nothing so we're not talking uh separate accounts we're talking accounting right the money is pooled general fund money which includes water and sewer enterprise trust funds which are five million dollars worth of money people gave the city years ago the emerson fund those types of things

▶ 2:20:37 Michael P. Zwirko: And the OPEB money, which is money that you've discussed, which is retirement to fund benefits down the line for retirees. Those are the only three places where money goes, and that's in every city and town, this is not specifically here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Motion to recommend the bottom line for this budget, Madam Chair. Second. The motion to recommend the bottom line made by Alderman Mortimer, seconded by Alderman Forbes on discussion. I have a question. We have a queue. discussion we have presidents work oh thank you madam chair just a couple things thank you for being here this late this evening I had three quick two questions and one comment the question I had is regarding liens over time have we

▶ 2:21:25 seen liens that we've been seeking to attach have those gone down over time over the past like five years or so do you have any figures on that what was of questions uh liens liens what kind of liens um i liens on both um real estate and water and sewer perfectedly oh i mean if that's pretty routine um i mean again it's a definition of words everything's a lien yeah um perfected liens they stay about the same okay so it's just it's and usually it's the same players okay so it's not there's not necessarily a trend collections are good people pay their bills right um it'll be interesting to see what happens with the water and sewer bills we have a lot of liens on that um but with the new people used to not pay their

▶ 2:22:09 Michael P. Zwirko: water and sewer bill and let it flow onto the real estate and probably incorrectly take the deduction the new rules that's not going to be advantage right advantageous to them going forward so it'll be interesting to look at this year who starts didn't used to pay their bills starts paying it because it's expensive not to pay them i mean you get lien fees and demand fees and 14 interest it's nothing to sneeze at either in the in a follow-up to that on the liens i i actually asked this question to the city auditor there is a program and this is more of kind of like a public service announcement there is a program for folks that many many elderly don't take advantage of and you do have the option of um

▶ 2:22:59 Michael P. Zwirko: deferring the payment on your property taxes to the city and then when you sell that property the city collects the property taxes plus interest it's almost like a reverse mortgage program but the city does offer that and in my communications with the city assessor not auditor rather that not many people take advantage of this but there is advertisements at the benefits fairs for the seniors that's see your local assessor for those that information i mean he deals with them on that we we maintain them we collect the payments we maintain the accounts right but as far as interaction with the public and who but i know my mother wouldn't want any liens on her house right and something eating at it even though the interest rate is lower than the 16 they still they want to give

▶ 2:23:45 Michael P. Zwirko: the house in whole but there are i mean there's a half of this probably eight people nine people to do it it's there if they need it right exactly and i'm really only bringing it up just to as an advertisement um one of the concerns that you've raised in with resources you know and i was always kind of opposed to going to monthly billing i think you know people are accustomed to quarterly billing with their property taxes i i think quarterly billing with water and sewer makes sense um so it's you know there might be a point where we get to diminishing returns and we'd like to hear from you if if in fact we do reach that with with the the frequency of monthly billing and the the drain on resources that it brings yeah i don't know if you'd ever be able to go

▶ 2:24:28 Michael P. Zwirko: backwards on it but i mean i i we're well positioned now with this what we've just done now we're happy we're a full staff office now and we're able to provide what we need to provide So, I mean, again, of course, if it goes crazy, if everybody went over, your postage is going to go through the roof. Well, that's, it's not only the postage, but it's the transactional work. And again, I'm a partner in this with the water and sewer piece, like we're the collection agency. Yeah. So, I mean, they're- It's a downstream effect. Yeah. I understand. And then the last comment is that you had mentioned Century Bank, that we use them sometimes. My understanding is that they're not FDIC insured, they're self-insured, aren't they?

▶ 2:25:11 they're fdic insured i mean again you have to make some decisions for me to put three million dollars in a payroll i can't put it in three million dollars divided by 250 banks and pay people out of all that there's some you keep an eye on the banks and the integrity and the quality of the banks we've been using century the lockbox services and a number of things and we keep an eye on it all the money is liquid it can go in a day i didn't think they were federally registered i thought they were self-insured okay in any event those are all the questions i had thank you thank you for coming this evening i have one question this year you initiated a change in your online bill paying system how's it how's that going how's it being responded from the public

▶ 2:26:00 consultant we haven't heard any complaints and we're seeing more payments we also i mean that's probably for the public and everything else we used to charge a quarter i mean 40 cents if you wanted to use a check now we're we're absorbing that cost so it's free if you want to pay it online so people are taking advantage of that um that's it out of my budget numbers somebody pays a bill across us a quarter to do it but it saves us on banking fees and transaction transaction costs and just overall handling paper so it's well worth it to us on that end we're seeing upticks as the world gets younger we're going to see more business over there and they provide a great product there's you know multi-language support on the back end

▶ 2:26:53 you can pay by phone we didn't have any of that before so and you couldn't get an old bill or see old payments and now you can't run the system now do you find that the monthly billing you're getting a faster turnaround of payment of the bills i haven't looked at that i mean i'd have to we'd have to look at delinquent ones and i haven't looked at that yet i mean we kind of let that take care of itself because once a year if you're delinquent we move it to your real estate so i that's just not something on my radar okay well thank you very much thank you madam chair thank you for the discussion the motion made and seconded to move the bottom line on this uh all in favor aye aye opposed that will move forward moving on to the next item on our agenda

▶ 2:27:40 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: it's department number 711 municipal debt in the amount of three million nine hundred nine thousand nine hundred and nine dollars madam chair i make a motion to join this budget with the subsequent budget number 751 municipal debt interest we have a motion to join 7-1-1 with 7-5-1 municipal debt interest in the amount of one million six hundred forty two thousand two hundred and eighteen dollars and one cent it's been seconded by alderman Passed on discussion all in favor of the motion to combine aye be opposed these are before you as combined department numbers alderman forbes thank you so this would be our annual payment principal and interest correct this is all the debt you owe all the amortization sheets that represents what's

▶ 2:28:27 owed by the city for previous authorizations and borrowings and what's due this year for principal and interest payments okay and then as of now do we know how much total debt we have outstanding as a municipality I don't know as of now but as you should have the statement of indebtedness that was I don't know if that was attached or not but right now June 30th 2017 we prepare this port report on an annual basis inside and outside 51 million 666 839 you said that was as of June of 17 correct mm-hmm okay thank you madam chair thank you thank you and could you just explain the two line items the that are in each department exempt non-exempt yes exempt is your debt exclusion you passed years ago for one of the schools the debt

▶ 2:29:41 exclusion so that's that's what we see that money's all that and and when does that uh complete 28 20 28. thank you any further discussion nobody else join budgets yep we have a motion to move the bottom line of the two conjoined department numbers 711 and 751 made by alderman mortimer seconded by alderman forbes all in favor aye aye any opposed Those will be moved forward as well. 752 is up next, projected debt, $147,444. This represents the, when you borrow or when you authorize, you don't go right to market and bond it. You do temporary interest for a couple years until the project's done to see how much it costs, to see what you need to borrow at the end of the day. so for a year you typically temporary borrow for a year and in this case we're doing two years

▶ 2:31:01 this is the money this is the amount of interest due on the 6.35 million we borrowed last november for the um modulus and this is an actual bill motion to accept the bottom line on this budget madam chair the motion to accept the bottom line made by alderman mortimer seconded by Alderman Boisselle on discussion all in favor aye any opposed we'll move forward as well last departmental budget hearing before us this evening is 916 medicare city portion in the amount of seven hundred sixty thousand dollars um I think you had a discussion on this last week about this year's budget and every year I get to see everybody to discuss this to get more money for this this represents for every dollar that goes out that's not tax deferred off out of a cafeteria

▶ 2:31:59 plan the health insurance and everything else the city's responsible to pay the federal government 1.45 and it's hard number to find because you can't tell as you earlier heard today we can't put a number on it so we always lowball it if if you pay another 200 000 in And over time to this department, that's 1.45% of that. I need that back in my budget. If you pay, even to renegotiate a contract and to give them back pay, I need 1.5% of that, 4.5% of that. So it's always been a guess. We've always guessed it too low. We've always had to come back. This year we're trying to address it and get ahead of it, and we hope this number holds. Or if we need any money next year, it'll be less. Thank you.

▶ 2:32:49 Motion to accept the bottom line on this budget, Madam Chair. Second. Motion to move the bottom line may be Alderman Mortimer, seconded by Alderman Boisselle on discussion. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? We'll move that forward as well. Thank you, Mr. Flavin. Thank you. The next order before us this evening is Order 2018-184, Water Enterprise Operating Budget for Fiscal Year 2019 in the amount of $5,290,060.69. I'm joined by Mr. Shenna and Mr. De La Russo. Thank you. Hello again. Hello, hello. Good evening. Good evening. I am pleased to be here with you to discuss the proposed fiscal 2019 water and sewer budgets in conjunct with Mr. John Shenna, the Director of the Department of Public Works.

▶ 2:34:03 i want to first extend my gratitude to the water and sewer committee for their diligent work on the fy 19 water and sewer enterprise fund budgets and i want to really commend them they did a phenomenal amount of work it was excellent work for those that had the good fortune to be there i think they would appreciate all that was done and i personally want to thank the committee under the direction of the chair john chena it's uh it is my opinion that we have clearly turned the corner as evidenced by the fact that our tax rate has consistently been approved without issue by the department of revenue division of local services in large part i would argue to the commitment we have made to provide for healthy fund and reserve balances

▶ 2:34:57 Specifically, we will have reached our target for fiscal 19 of a 10% reserve fund for both enterprises with the passage of automatic order 2018-192 for 1,079.3.10 for water, bringing the water fund reserve to 613,717.90. and Aldermatic Order No. 2018-193 for $16,287.90 for SOAR, bringing the SOAR Reserve Fund to $876,658.60. First and foremost, this means the stated objectives of the Board of Aldermen and the commitment made to the Department of Revenue Division of Local Services has been reached. The city needs to always strive to fulfill its commitment to maintaining these reserves at 10% of respective budgets. The fiscal 2019 water volumetric rate is increasing by 1.5% over last fiscal year.

▶ 2:36:17 and the sewer volumetric rate is not increasing at all the second year in a row. The city's determination on the type of tiered structure which best serves its constituency has paid dividends as we see revenue requirements being realized year after year and stronger positive communications building between residents and the DPW staff on water and sewer issues. That has been significant. The city has implemented in October 1st date for charging residents the new voted rates. Implementation of revised and aggressive senior and related discount programs has been completed. The city has implemented an opt-in monthly billing capability for residential and commercial customers who prefer to pay their water and sewer bills monthly

▶ 2:37:18 rather than quarterly. We have 600 out of 8,500 accounts, or approximately 7% of the customers. We would anticipate this number growing over the next year, and residents can switch over any time now by emailing or calling the administrative office. The city, having met its reserve goals, has minimized the need to raise as much revenue each fiscal year as it had before. This has assisted in reducing future rate increases, as we have seen. The city has implemented successful IEI programs aimed at reducing lost water. Over time, this will and has assisted the city in reducing future rate increases from the MWRA. The near completion of the citywide meter replacement project, new meters offer leak

▶ 2:38:27 detection, better customer service, and the ability to offer monthly billing. combined indirect costs for both water and sewer enterprises is at 10.94 percent approximately 11 the lowest percentage in five fiscal years the city has added two melrose citizens to the water and sewer committee the city has reinstated the second meter program and it is here to stay As far as moving forward, the City needs to proceed with the water and source service programs currently underway. This is no time to change course. We have witnessed a sharp decline in customers that are not satisfied with the services or fully understanding of the billing processes, partly due to staying consistent with our rate and billing structure over the past several years.

▶ 2:39:25 The City needs to always fulfill its commitment to building and maintaining reserves. The City needs to continue to provide the Department of Revenue Division of Local Services with the confidence that we have met the financial obligations of both funds and seek to realize continued tax rate approvals for the years ahead. city needs to continue to stabilize rate increases from year to year and the city continuously has to look for opportunities to reduce overall costs and like proportion with reduced demands for services in addition it would be beneficial to the city to seek legislative support to initiate efforts at providing financial relief to mwira communities through the state budget process thank you thank

▶ 2:40:23 you i just want to echo our auditors comments and thank the water and sewer committee especially ken who's here tonight and mary whirler they were new additions to the committee this year appointed to the chamber of the almanac board of aldermen and they were very engaged and very interactive and with discussion and they were quick learners and I appreciated what they what they brought to the discussions and I just want to peel it back one more layer I want to thank and acknowledge Lisa Patterson our water and sewer billing administrator and Donna Cardillo and the billing staff they did a tremendous job this year we instituted monthly billing we were still aggressive with our meter replacements but more importantly we

▶ 2:41:12 started to we started to maximize the technology that the new meters bring where we will reaching out to people where we've that we felt had leaks and that's something new that we did we started sending letters out to them and they were really engaged in and making those changes and trying to help people so that went well discussion has been going on for several months concerning these this package of orders that that are before you they we as a committee conduct those discussions openly in a combined group effort package it's before you was unanimously supported by all the members of our committee one component of the budget is the MW IRA assessment and I forwarded a lot of information over the last 24 hours but a section of it is MWRA consumption our

▶ 2:42:07 consumption in Melrose for water increased 2.2% and our consumption for sewer increased 2.9% so combined it was a 2.7% increase if you look at water and sewer assessment together and what we delivered what we have to pay to the MWRA similar communities as us that are 100% dependent on both water and sewer with the MWRA so our average increases of four point two and three point nine percent so overall we were below average below the average increase in both water and sewer and similar MWRA communities overall our consumption what we consumed from the MWRA was less in 2017 than 2016 we read our consumption was down 8% in what we brought in and I think we saw about a 7.7 percent reduction in what we

▶ 2:43:10 build out to residents so people did consume less water and they correlate from what we brought in and what we build out that was good to see the package of orders that are before you they adequately staff and fund all of our department our material expenses our contractual expenses but more importantly the package addresses three things that are important to the administration and I know that have always been important to the board of aldermen and that's affordability stability of funds and stabilities of increases also in the package that I provided I went back to fiscal 2012 to give a brief history of the rate increases this is something we did with the water and sewer committee number one to give the new committee members some

▶ 2:44:08 background but also to reflect back on what what it was like and what it is today and how the goal today is to maintain stability and keep that increase as low as possible and I think we were able to do that and that history and that chart shows that the days of increases nearly 7% 5% behind us and hopefully the behind us for a while I mentioned meter replacements so at this point last year we were substantially complete but substantially complete still meant that we had a little bit of work to do and i'm happy to report today that 97 of our accounts have meters that were have been replaced and 98 of our second meters were also replaced but what's that mean there's still about 300 customers out there that have meters that need

▶ 2:45:08 to be replaced we used the ordinance that the alderman passed last year there were about 230 manual read feeds fees that we initially assessed 230 people received the certified letter saying change your meter or you're going to be assessed the fee they didn't we assessed the fee and we were able to get 77 of them replaced after the fee was assessed the first time hence waiving the fee but there are still 153 meters out there that of people who receive letters that have to be replaced so we're still doing that in-house regards to our opt-in program about eight to ten percent of the community has opted into monthly billing we started offering that in the fall we went section by section throughout the uh throughout the city we've

▶ 2:46:10 everyone in the city has received the opportunity and received the letter to opt in to monthly billing if they'd like to and now we're going to actually try to get a note right on the bill and whoever wants to do it can do it regardless of you have to do it according to your billing cycle so it would have to be at the time you receive a bill but that program is available for whoever wants to switch to monthly billing if you prefer to do your finances that way and more importantly it allows you to keep track of your consumption and leaks in the home the majority of the water and operating budget the water budget has an increase of 1.4 percent and the sewer budget has an increase of 1.8 percent debt aside nearly 48 cents of every dollar that we collect in water

▶ 2:47:04 is going directly to the mwra and nearly 75 percent of every dollar we collect is going directly to the mwra and sewer and to emphasize that or to to demonstrate that in your packet you'll see a pie chart and the pie chart still shows how overwhelming the mwra will help overwhelming of a presence the mwra is to our operating budgets i've also included excel spreadsheets that break the budget down and also give a description of why the increase or decrease and at this point if there are any questions thank you very much for that information and overview we do have just a reminder the water enterprise operating budget in front of us at this point motion to combine orders and seek to combine orders 2 0 1 8 dash 1 8 4 with 2 0 1 8

▶ 2:48:07 dash 1 8 5 second a motion made by President Zwirko and seconded by Alderman Forbes to combine order 2018-18 for the water enterprise operating budget with 2018-25 the sewer enterprise operating budget all in favor of combining the two aye aye any opposed the combined order is before you thank you thank you for being here tonight I appreciate your presentation I have just a series of questions I just wanted to go through with you can you just tell us what the retained earnings were for this fiscal year for water and sewer yes it was for water four hundred and twelve thousand four twenty nine and saw three seventy nine four fifty four fifty and about twenty thousand dollars of that money is going to go towards reserves that's marked in those two orders that are

▶ 2:49:16 Scott M. Forbes: before us tonight but those remaining funds what do we those to help pay for some of the capital improvement projects that we have in line or what are the purpose where would that money be going the free cash that's is not appropriate will simply flow to the bottom line for both funds and go into next year's determination of free cash thank you okay so looking at the information that's presented before us can we just talk about there were no changes to the base fees for water because we're currently at 10 percent sewer base fees are going up from six percent to eight percent as we continue their climb to ten um is ten percent for a base fee is that standard is it enough do we need to maybe reevaluate and take a look at that and possibly we when we had our consultant here

▶ 2:50:23 um a few years back now that's a recommendation that they made and they made that based on the costs in our budget what we know we're going to spend reading meters sending out bills electricity things that we know we're going to do and he said he equated it to about 10% of the budget and that's always been our goal that said the next fiscal year one of the things I want to do is have the consultant come back and and update us and look at our operating budget again and and as we approach the 10% to see if 10% still the goal or if it should be something to see if the 10 actually covers those hard costs right right okay yeah that's what i was and that's a healthy thing um the consultant has been away for three years now so part of the

▶ 2:51:09 Scott M. Forbes: budget does have funding to bring him back in the fall to look at our bills again he'll look at all 8 600 bills look at our operating budget and our costs and um and see if that's still a goal that we should be um striving towards next year great uh i definitely appreciate in the package having the rate history the consumption charts um all the information you know obviously the more information that we can present the better can we just uh i just want to kind of take a dive into those uh the indirect costs can you just kind of explain to everybody the the concept of indirect costs not only for the people here at the board but also for everyone watching at home and how they apply to the budgets that are presented before us tonight?

▶ 2:51:51 Certainly. Absolutely. As part of Massachusetts General Law's Chapter 44, we are provided a vehicle to account for the resources necessary to manage and operate both enterprise funds under the Department of Revenue category entitled, in particular, Shared Employees. Clearly, from a funding perspective, it is the most cost-effective approach when one considers how much it would cost otherwise to fund these services. If we were required to hire full-time staff with benefits, it would be substantially higher. For example, if we simply look at the legal cost, how much you think we would have to pay for the procurement services, contract development, authorization, compliance matters, bidding disputes, collective bargaining issues, contract negotiations, JLMC representation

▶ 2:52:48 if necessary, contract impasse matters, employee grievances, et cetera, workers' compensation matters, representation, fact-finding, et cetera, contract billing disputes, claims, related time contract performance issues etc legal opinions regarding water and soil matters the list goes on and on what's good is that um the department of revenue division of local services under general law chapter 44 section 53 f and a half let's turn here because it might be good It's good for everyone here to, and I appreciate the question, to refresh where this comes from and why we have it. As is stated here, Department of Revenue, appropriation for indirect cost. Indirect costs are generally appropriated as part of the general fund operating budget and

▶ 2:53:56 are allocated to the enterprise fund as reported on schedule A-2. We do not appropriate these costs in both the general fund operating budget and in the enterprise fund budget. What I passed out for everyone was three sheets. One is this one here that talks about allocation to services. This is directly from Costing Municipal Services, Department of Revenue, Division of Local Services. And it says, and I want to read it for the record because of the misinformation that I heard earlier this evening. It says, number one, that although indirect costs are not easily attributable to individual services, they are an essential part of the cost of municipal government. and it is important to include them in the full cost of providing municipal services.

▶ 2:55:02 For this reason, indirect costs are allocated to departments and services according to the amount of indirect costs for which they are responsible. Number two, indirect costs are distinguished from direct costs by the fact that they cannot be assigned precisely to various municipal activities. As a result, the indirect costs allocated to a particular department or service are approximate rather than exact costs. We are not a manufacturing company, so everyone should realize that. Sometimes this fact bothers officials who like to have precise cost figures. It is important to remember that even though indirect costs are approximations, including them and the full cost of municipal services results in more accurate cost information than if they are not included at all.

▶ 2:56:01 And number three, the director of accounts may reject any community's methodology, written or otherwise, as unreasonable for tax rate setting purposes. It is very important, therefore, that we follow the protocol requested by the Department of Revenue Division of Local Services and maintain an allocation methodology that is reasonable and calculated in a fair and consistent basis. That was written by the Department of Revenue Division of Local Services. Also, what you have in your budget book is the breakdown. This is their breakdown. They developed this worksheet. We're required to comply with what they're requesting. We do that each and every year. We have never had a year where they challenged or questioned the indirect cost assigned to

▶ 2:57:11 any budget in this city. We have never had an audit finding of any kind on the indirect cost applied to any fund within this city, ever. So if someone makes an accusation otherwise, they simply are ignorant, and they don't understand basic municipal finance law. Here is the tax rate that is approved by the Department of Revenue. Over the years, the directors have changed however each and every year a new director scrutinizes what we submit it is certified take a look at our history I also provided you a five-year history our approximation of indirect cost over five years is approximately eleven point four percent reasonable and consistent do you know what other communities around us use for indirect costs percentages what do you think malden uses

▶ 2:58:21 combined ours is 11 11 what do you think saugus uses 11 what do you think salem uses 10 percent. What do you think Saugus uses? Eleven percent. What do you think Winchester uses? Twenty-three percent. Why? Because by following the methodology provided by the Department of Revenue, Division of Local Service, and guidance from the independent auditors, those percentages and are used consistently, and they're approved consistently by the Commonwealth. We know what we're doing, and if anything, we should— in fact, it's interesting, I'm glad you brought that up also, because guess which community they asked to submit information on their indirect cost so that they could try to set up a system where others would uniformly provide that information.

▶ 2:59:33 It was us. They asked me to submit our methodology to them so they could try to create a uniform system for all cities and towns, even over and above what they had provided here, because we are consistent and accurate. it. So again, it's something that we take great pride in, and I think that the cost that we're showing and representing more than without a doubt clearly indicates the approximate cost for those services. Look at the treasurer's office. Guess how many bills they process for water and sewer a year. $40,000. Guess who has to process the payments for the vendors? The payments to the city, the walk-ins, the counter work, the refunds. Who has to reconcile financial statements to my office, the treasurer?

▶ 3:00:35 Process online payments, as we heard this evening. Apply to customer accounts. Reconcile differences. Address non-payment issues the list goes on and on and on and where my office is concerned we have to process we have to audit we have to approve every single vendor payment every single payroll submitted regarding water and sewer we have to prepare all the information for the outside auditors the the Department of Revenue, Division of Local Services, Standard & Poor's, our bond rating company, our bond council, that all comes from the office of the auditor, treasurer, collector. The amount of work is phenomenal on water and sewer. So to suggest for any moment that any of these figures are out of line or there's something improper being done

▶ 3:01:31 Scott M. Forbes: is simply a disgrace. Thank you. thank you um well you answered my next question because i was going to ask you if we reached out to other municipalities to compare our percentages of indirect costs to see if we're equal to less than or above average so i appreciate you sharing that with us um concept of shared employees now we have 15 employees from seven different departments that total about 530 000 dollars of our 1.6 and direct costs um out of those 15 employees or out of those seven departments they play different roles correct um do you know would you be able to summarize what roles they play as far as legal and like just as a i just read over i read the list as to what the legal department provides correct so that's phenomenal that's the only what i gave you was just a snapshot

▶ 3:02:26 of what they do because don't forget we have employees nine in water and three in soar that are part of a union and that as the director will tell you there's issues that pertain to staff and employees that have to be addressed um procurement the as i indicated earlier legal opinions uh everything from contract disputes because just because you go out to bid It doesn't mean you're not going to get a dispute from a contractor because they lost the bid. You have to handle that dispute in a legal and professional way. There's a phenomenal amount of work that goes into that. Documentation, which we don't want to talk about, but it's true. The fact that the amount of work that you have to put forward for documentation today,

▶ 3:03:14 the amount of work that we have to put forward for simply maintaining backup data to what transpires is phenomenal. we have to record everything you have to identify you have to document in a way that in the past as I said before you know ten years ago I've never seen the volume that we have to do today it's really has increased phenomenal okay so health insurance and pensions I'm assuming that I look at the water and the sewer for the indirect cost they're different amounts they're not allocated identically since the salaries are allocated identically no because what happens in the health insurance we actually go by the program of the plan that the person the employee is under specifically that's why you'll see a

▶ 3:04:07 Scott M. Forbes: change because as employees change plans the cost change as if an employee took an opt-out the cost would go go down if they were on a family plan so we actually go through that process of identifying that very very clearly as well okay and then I know that includes the Medicare to which was talked about earlier yep and I know we briefly touched on the technology portion of all this I know before we were reaching out to consultants and asking them to build us models but now we actually have that technology we're able to do that engineers office and we'll be actually able to forecast out depending upon if if it's a dry month or a wet or a dry quarter or a wet quarter and try to be able to connect the dots

▶ 3:04:55 Scott M. Forbes: and be more proactive instead of playing catch up yeah and again through the chair to all the enforcement that has been a phenomenal help we saw the model in in action we're able to change the assumptions and when the output that comes out of it to make decisions on that we couldn't do that five years ago so this has been a significant jump and to everyone's credit again another effort by the committee to make that happen okay I think that's everything I have for right now I thank you for everyone's leniency I know I kind of spoke at length here but you know there's still a lot of work to do as far as water and sewer you know looking at the looking at the 2017 numbers on the MWRA website our average bill is over $2,300 as opposed to doing

▶ 3:05:45 Scott M. Forbes: 3,000 cubic feet a quarter that is the second highest or actually no the third highest Redding and Belmont are the two communities with higher totals than us and then Milton and Newton are the only other communities that are above $2,000 I think the average is about 1,600 bucks so I know there's work to do but I know that you know we're being aggressive and I and I and we're hoping that that will bear fruit and hopefully some of these costs will come down and I agree leaf so and be good thank you very much thank you thank you um in terms of just the budgets alone i i know um mr shenna i believe i saw there was a vacancy in the uh i want to say the water foreman position is that still vacant and do you what do you expect to happen there we're actually

▶ 3:06:42 preparing an offer for someone right now but that's um that's a position that we've had a lot of trouble filling that position requires a distribution level three certified license from the uh from the state that's the position that matt hickey held for nearly 50 years so we had to be very uh proven in our selection process to make sure that um we we hired someone who had the license or the ability to obtain one in a short amount of time so we have a we've recently put a plan in place we're about to we're about to finalize that and that will no longer be a vacancy okay um i'm just going to talk a little bit in general here and you know i think i'm going to kind of address the past a little bit but i really want to stay focused in the present

▶ 3:07:39 Monica C. Medeiros: it because that's where we are today and that's where we're going to move forward and i think you know that mr shenna you hit it on the head when you said that you know some of our priorities are affordability stability of funds stability of increases and i think you know some of the frustration that's been seen by you know i think the the board in the past at least myself And I think some of the people in the public are that, you know, it's good to see the detail and the indirect cost, which we, you know, we're not necessarily seeing as much detail of that in the past. And that, you know, if we see this most recent five years, there's not much difference in that number. You know, if we did go back about three years prior to that, there was a big jump.

▶ 3:08:36 Monica C. Medeiros: And I think the frustration that I had in particular was that it wasn't necessarily fully presented. And it did represent a shift in cost bearing to the rate payers and off of the general fund budget. And that's not anything that, you know, I don't think there's been any movement, I don't personally believe there's been any movement of funds that was illegal I just want to you know say that clearly if I thought there was something illegal I'd be saying I would be yelling a lot more but there is a policy shift decision and doing that making that shift that we saw probably about 70 years ago to really increase that percentage that did open up funds to get more cash flow in the operating fund budget and it more it may have more accurately described all of

▶ 3:09:45 Monica C. Medeiros: the costs to the water and sewer fund but it's not necessarily something that we had to do but it's something that I think we the administration chose to do and in that's that's something that's come to bear now we saw big increases in the in the average bill at that time which were pretty jarring to some people we changed the rate structure and we did that very quickly and you know i am happy that this what we're going to see later on for rates are pretty much stable again um for the second year in a row which is which was basically unheard of before in tobacco we are now we see the the list of the indirect costs and you know you can see dollar for dollar not just percentage wise but you can see dollar for dollar that they

▶ 3:10:39 Monica C. Medeiros: are more consistent and they're not having big swings like we had seen you know a few years prior where 45 percent increase in that from one year to the next and that um come on so you know and back to where we are today i think we've made great strides to that i don't think we can you know i don't think we can go back um because it's it's done but i'm glad to see that we are having consistency and you know not huge swings so um i do just want to point out too that these percentages are not percentage of the say health and it's not that this cost is say the percentage of the health insurance budget as a whole it's a pers it's the percent of the budgeted cost for the budgeted cost of correct correct correct absolutely correct so if you looked at

▶ 3:11:43 say the treasurer's office to employees it's not you know 0.6 percent of the treasurer's time it's 0.6 percent of this budget so just people get get that thank you thank you it's a point of information if i made through the chair to alderman medeiros i was there in fy 13 when the department of revenue came here to the city because the water and saw enterprise funds at that time had no reserves we had run a deficit and the sore enterprise fund the department of regular director of accounts jerry perry came here himself sat with me and two of the aldermen the board at that time and the mayor and set out policies and guidelines for us to follow including the indirect cost methodology and we actually did that over a span of several years

▶ 3:12:45 so that we didn't i think i mentioned to the board before so we didn't have a larger increase in one year over the next they allowed us to spread it out over multiple years to avoid that but it's because we didn't have reserves that the rates had to go up as hot as high as they did for for as long as they did until we met our reserve requirement. It wasn't for nothing. The second thing is that they changed their methodology. They wanted us to have a more formal procedure which we adopted and as a result reflected what it really cost, really cost to run both those enterprise funds, period. And we were also required to hire a consultant, which we did do. We had two of them to ensure that our rates were going to be consistent and applied and

▶ 3:13:36 take out any politics from the processes which we were told. And finally, I was required to provide them with monthly reports of our progress myself through my office until they were satisfied that we were continuing on the effort and the initiative they indicated or or they were not going to set our tax rate that year so it didn't come from out of the sky and it wasn't something that was initiated by just us we followed to the letter of the law because we have to have a tax rate if we don't send out tax bills we're out of business period so we followed the guidelines from the director himself and adhere to those guidelines what you see is the results of years and years of compliance with their guidelines in their recommendations I am very proud to offer

▶ 3:14:33 Michael P. Zwirko: what I offer here and I'm very proud of the work that's been done and I think everyone in here should be proud thank you thank you madam chair I'll try to be as succinct as possible but I'm gonna be a little bit all over the place on some of the questions so and first of all again thank you for all the work on the committee the Commission rather throughout the year I know that the spring gets rather busy and you meet a couple times so I also wanted to add that Alderman Medeiros last year put in the ordinance for a night meeting which I appreciate because I was able to attend so appreciate that order last year and also on the ability to have residents because they it's more likely that they can show up at night first question and you alluded to this

▶ 3:15:24 Michael P. Zwirko: earlier I think last year the number of meters that we still had not changed was about 300 but we put an ordinance in had that figure changed because of the ordinance or was there any I guess benefit to the city with the ordinance did we find did you say that we started to find people or did we find them then change the meter I mean the ultimate goal is to bring that 300 down to zero did it move in the past year or did we just find 77 okay I missed that earlier and the balance is still being fined okay it's called a manual read fee right not a fine but every quarter I believe is $50 they pay $50 extra because they won't let us in yet sure we're trying to do some other things we have some ideas

▶ 3:16:06 Michael P. Zwirko: I need to talk to the building inspector see if there's a way to tie in the plumbing inspector and maybe and other items maybe maybe even metal items just a way to get someone's attention so this way we can go in and finish this up thank you for the effort especially in the last year with the benefit of the ordinance I want to go back a little bit the it was mentioned during your presentation with the city engineer that in 2008 we had put in the INI donation balance due to development and I'm curious do we know is that has that kind of leveled off a little bit I mean I know that there have been development projects over the past decade that those they tail off that that balance is it level no that we assess I&I mitigation whether it's a project like the senior

▶ 3:17:06 Michael P. Zwirko: home on Essex Street and sometimes even if people just add a bedroom we look at we look at it in a project by project basis we have a fund and the fund is managed by the auditor's office and where those are where that revenue goes and those are dedicated for future I&I future I&I projects the I was looking at the it's the last page of the packet that you gave us which was I appreciated is the water and sewer rate history from 2012 to present and my first question before we get through to go through the history is it possible under current law to have different classifications of residential property for billing purposes I have to check with I'd have to check for you on that one okay so then I'll get to the history of this so we used to have a flat rate then we

▶ 3:18:07 Michael P. Zwirko: moved to a three tiered structure excuse me we used to have a flat rate but we had separate rates for residential and commercial then we went to a three tiered rate that didn't which removed the commercial we stayed there and then we moved to a two tiered rate all and while along we added base fees and now where we're at is the two tiered rate with base fees how come there's no commercial rate we went straight volumetric the basis of our rate system when we went away from commercial and residential five six years ago was to go of pure volumetric you pay what you use and if you use more you pay more regardless if you're a single family house or if you're a business the reason we went there it was a recommendation of

▶ 3:18:54 the uh of the consultant it's something that a lot of a lot of water districts put in place we're 96 percent or more residential and we have some residents that use more water than our commercial base our commercial base is a realtor commercial base is a tiny little coffee shop it might not be using a lot of water and that's why we put the system that we put in place I attached yesterday as well this way you know we see these accounts all the time but that's so that the alderman if the public are interested as well you could see who our top users are and um and the basis of the system was the more water you use the more you owe the dis the system um and that's why we went where we went and that's why there isn't commercial or residential um and you know

▶ 3:19:55 Michael P. Zwirko: mechanically that would even be a difficult thing to do because we'd have to go back and really figure out who truly is commercial and true truly is residential and we have some accounts that about that's why this is a straightforward volumetric approach where if you use a lot of water you pay more and if you don't use a lot of water you play you pay less with with the base fees covering the portion of our budget that we know we're going to spend to run a system I I mean I guess I understand the difference in the pros and cons of volumetric I just feel that for commercial properties a coffee shop for example can make money off their water I can't make money off my water so I feel that they could bear a little bit more of the costs even if it was volumetric

▶ 3:20:47 Michael P. Zwirko: and I'm just we used to have them we decided to move away from them I I'd appreciate it if maybe in the next year, we look into this a little bit more about and even if we have to go back and start looking at what properties are commercial, I mean, when I look at the list of users, the first one is the hospital. I would presume that they would be considered commercial. I know they're a nonprofit, but I don't think that they're residential. So it's I think it's worth investigating again residents and when you just when you lumped everybody into one residential volumetric you're taking away the ability for a business to profit off the use of the water. So I think I think it's worth the time to look into.

▶ 3:21:40 Michael P. Zwirko: The Alderman Forbes had mentioned earlier about the appropriations that's needed for reserves and I went back and I looked at what we did last year and we directed those excesses back and it I believe in your question your answer to Alderman Forbes questioning we're actually doing that so it's going back into but it won't affect this year's rates it'll just go back in for for 2019 is that right yeah we'll just close it out it'll be used as one of the factors to the retained earnings calculation for next year and final question are we I'm so in 2016 we had the study the consultant I apologize I forget the name Woodward Woodcock and associates and in their presentation in April of 2016 they made

▶ 3:22:49 Michael P. Zwirko: a suggestion to us that our reserves should target or the city should be striving for 20 to 25 percent correct um that seems to me um gratuitous and we've decided that the current target should be 10 are we comfortable staying there is there an idea that we may seek to raise the reserves higher in the future will we be using the reserves at all are we saving the reserves for exactly its use when we have a a potential deficit i know that there were similar uh i believe it was winthrop and stonem that decided to dip into their reserves one year to lower the rates and they ended up that ended up backfiring but i'm just curious you know based on the consultant's report from 2016 and i know that we've achieved our

▶ 3:23:40 Michael P. Zwirko: target last year what's the future of the reserve account at least from my perspective i'm comfortable at ten percent you're comfortable at ten percent and i know that our bond rating agencies also look at the enterprise accounts do you feel that absolutely do you feel that they're comfortable at ten percent they're comfortable in my opinion at the ten percent i also think they're comfortable that we're consistent and that they don't see the the dips that we're we have a target we we strive for it and uh we haven't let up on that that's just as important to them thank you and that's the end of my questioning but just to move this forward i'd like to make a motion to recommend on the combined orders the motion to recommend orders 2018 and 2018 184 and 2018 185 second

▶ 3:24:22 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: seconded by alderman forbes any further discussion all in favor aye aye opposed those items will be recommended for thank you very very much thank you and next up we have order 2018-192 and appropriations from account number sixty one zero six one zero zero dash three one nine zero zero zero water retained earnings in the amount of one thousand seven hundred ninety three dollars and ten cents to account number eight four one six dash four nine zero zero zero zero water reserve of retained earnings yes um again as i indicated earlier with this appropriation it would uh provide us the ten percent in reserves for both water and so on respectfully both for both of them yes i'd like to make a motion to join uh order number 2018-192 which was just read along with 2018-193 which is

▶ 3:25:22 Scott M. Forbes: the appropriation uh for the sixteen thousand two hundred and eighty seven dollars and ninety cents for the sewer retained earnings second we have a motion to combine orders 2018-192 and 2018-193 made by ottoman ford second by ottoman mortimer all in favor all right any post those items are joined we still have the floor i still have the floor thank you um so talking about our 10 reserves i know i know we just kind of touched base with that i think moving forward as long as we make that annual adjustment to stay at that 10 that's really what we're looking for now you got through the chair absolutely right we're not looking for hundreds of thousands of dollars any more to plop into these accounts we're doing right this year is is 20 20 grand absolutely not

▶ 3:26:09 Scott M. Forbes: okay um and just for the record for the last two fiscal years in our calculations we have have not raised any funds to put towards reserves all right and originally this was a five-year plan and we completed it and i believe four so we were a year ahead of the curve um so just just to go on reserves i i look at it this way where one where one capital improvement project gone wrong or one bad year of these funds possibly being depleted correct i mean just given in any in any given year you know and it's so true and again through the chair to all of them what a great point because as i indicated in a previous meeting this also takes the stress off the general fund for the bond rating agencies because should an event like that occur and you didn't have the capacity to

▶ 3:26:59 Scott M. Forbes: address it your general fund would be the responsible to do that and that's just not what you want to do if you don't have to god forbid but um that's exactly why you need them okay and one of my final questions is if we wanted to be more aggressive per se and continue to go forward with maybe additional i i projects um what what would what would the opinion be if we were to tap into some of those reserve accounts to do an i i project that could potentially make us i don't know it'd be more advantageous through the overall assessment than our competitive communities great question through the chair to the ultimate i see them as two independent entities i don't blend or mix either one of them because particularly first of all the reserve

▶ 3:27:45 which i indicated earlier the reasons why we want to maintain that secondly is looking to do more I I with the existing staff what's required to do that and the costs associated with being able to manage additional I I we haven't even talked about that's why it's a separate and distinct subject because respectfully to to this superintendent there's only so many projects with the existing staff that we have I believe John if I'm wrong correct me that we're able to manage successfully, so we have to really think about it. I'd love to do 10 million in I.I., for example, but I also know what would be involved in trying to manage that and what the impact would have on my office, the treasurer's office,

▶ 3:28:31 and obviously on DPW. I don't know if John wants to add to that. No, and if you talk about using reserves to fund I.I. projects, that's something that I don't know if I would support. I think the risk outweighs the benefit. risk of not having reserve funds is um we lived through it so we're kind of little we're a little biased towards it but the dor could not approve a tax rate and they came really close to doing that five years ago and i was in the room um our reserve account that savings it it's essential to running these enterprise systems i i don't think we need to exceed 10 but i would never like to see it go below retained earnings that are above and beyond the reserve that's that's a

▶ 3:29:19 Scott M. Forbes: discussion point i think something that we could actually consider absolutely i think that's something that i even mentioned in committee towards the end of our meetings um that i i'd like to reconvene the committee in the fall and see where we stand and and maybe add to what we just voted on tonight to some extent with those funds but that that's something i would support but not using the reserves i'm very happy to see them at 10 and i'd like them to stay for a considerable future at that level okay and then one other thing just to consider too is that if we're tapping into all of the available funds through the mwra assistance program any additional capital improvement project we do is on our own dollars right we're not getting any more

▶ 3:29:58 Monica C. Medeiros: additional grant funding than the ones that we applied for am i correct in saying that correct so these projects would actually be more of a cost to the city however if we did have those funds available we'd have to do the analysis and see if it's beneficial for us to pull the trigger or not right right okay thank you thank you all the members thank you uh so so following up on that the the 412 i actually that was the total i guess 412 429 dollars in water retained earnings for fy18 and 379 450 for sewer retained earnings so that's we're taking from that to fund the reserves tonight correct which is just um so you know that leaves well over 350 000 in sewer retained earnings and you know well over 400 000 in water retained

▶ 3:31:03 earnings and that seems like a lot of money to like if we don't use that now it goes into next year's calculations and we can't access that again until the end of next fiscal year is that correct yeah through the chair but you may not get it back because just says you see on the general fund free cash there's a whole host of offsets that apply um that they takeaways from your general fund balance your unassigned fund balance is here and then there's takeaways from that part of that undersigned fund balance would be the 300 000 for example carried over but then they would look at what encumbrances we have what offsets we have so what happens is it whittles down to what they consider an available fund taking out all these takeaways so

▶ 3:31:59 you know and I always stress that even on the general fund I always stress that you know it wouldn't it's not a reasonable to see the general fund have 3.3 million for example as we saw this past year and fund balance at the end of the year unassigned if you want to use that term let's use that for tonight but also to see a million dollars offset so you only end up with 2 million in free cash because of all the takeaways so even though you rolled it over when they get done with the takeaways the encumbrances for example chapter 90 funds that are not we haven't sought reimbursement for that that's a takeaway from free cash even though it's all it's all there and it's nothing we did that's a takeaway so I always caution everyone don't it's not and I would love to do it

▶ 3:32:46 but you can't do that you can't ever assume anything because it's not your decision to make they will advise us the Department of Revenue based on our balance sheet on our encumbrances on what we have written receivables etc what they would consider blessing as a free cash because once it's done then obviously they're responsible in that way so they have to be sure that what they're giving us is reasonable and accurate the great question did you considered putting any of that either of those funds into capital stabilization so that we could so we spoke to what could we do with that funding and actually that's one of my questions what could we do with that we elected to do is to close the fiscal year because we still have fiscal 18 expenses that we

▶ 3:33:41 have to cover we haven't closed our fiscal year we have projections that you know make us feel comfortable right now a lot more comfortable than we were five years ago that we will make the fiscal year but if we don't that's something those retained earnings could help us absorb any deficit that this fiscal year and you're not going to know that until the fall but come the fall i think it's going to be one of our first discussions of you know okay where do we stand how did we close fiscal 18 where are we projecting our retained earnings to be and and you know do we want to use some of them um towards capital investment and that's a fair it's a fair discussion it's a discussion i look forward to having and um and but you know within that discussion we're also going to talk

▶ 3:34:28 well how much do how much do we want to spend and how much of it do we want to save so that we're in a good position this time next year as well yeah i know you you know mentioned things like aging fleet in your budget um it's a good discussion to have um how do we spend our money as opposed to are we going to make it so i'm happy i'm happy and i look forward to having it and if some you know god forbid some fleet piece of equipment give out in the middle of the fiscal here we can can we draw on this or no by the vote of the board absolutely we have to be absolutely absolutely you can vote on that thank you thank you here's before you uh motion to move uh bottom line on orders 2018-192 and 2018-193

▶ 3:35:25 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: we have a motion to recommend for passage for the combined orders made by alderman Board seconded by president Search all in favor aye aye any opposed move forward to the full board thank you thank you we return to the top of our agenda this evening uh for the last two orders before us order beginning with order 2018-178 proposed fy19 water rates would you like to address this before we take questions from the committee we can go straight to questions in our um our opening statements the um the water rate base fees are remaining the same there's an increase to six dollars and forty four cents on the first step and um there's an increase to eight dollars and seventy five cents that's a twelve cent increase

▶ 3:36:27 ten cent increase on the first step and a twelve cent increase on the second step on water and then on sewer there is no change on the volumetric rate there are changes on the base fee i included a rate increase impact spreadsheet which shows that the majority of melrose about 80 will see up to a seven dollar per quarter increase with the package that's before you and just to remind everyone the data still shows that roughly 81 of melrose accounts consumed between 0 and 2500 cubic feet per quarter there is another 11 11 and a half percent that consumed between 2500 and 3000 cubic feet so when you when you put that together about 92 of of our accounts are at 3 000 cubic feet per quarter or less i think people are very familiar with our rate structure they're they're trying they now

▶ 3:37:37 Scott M. Forbes: try to they know where that cut off is for them and they try to stay within that first that first here um that's why the stability and the familiarity of of what we put on our bill in terms of the structure is a huge benefit to to to our consumers thank you um not really a question but more or less just a comment i know you know last year we had no increase in water no increase in sewer in the volumetric rate this year there's a one and a half percent increase in water and a zero percent increase in sewer you know i i'm hopeful that we've you know been able to either say turn the corner or stop the bleeding per se um you know emphasize before we still are amongst one of the highest as far as

▶ 3:38:29 Scott M. Forbes: annual bills are concerned so that is something that we need to address and hopefully as we move forward like we talk about if there's never in you know increasing the base charges or you know taking a harder look at costs that in these ini programs as they continue to work that we'll see see some cost benefit for that so that's all I have thank you thank you thank you and it could you tell us what the average bill is it's on the spreadsheet that's that highlighted part in green I believe but if you a customer who uses fifteen hundred cubic feet is was paying 282 dollars a quarter and will now be paying 290 dollars a quarter um and then it continues up and down that spreadsheet but um like i said 80 81.4

▶ 3:39:28 Monica C. Medeiros: of melrose used 2 000 cubic feet or less and at 2 000 cubic feet you're seeing a 7.70 increase and that's on a 374.51 bill okay and uh you know i i too uh you know i wanted i want to thank you i was happy that i got to attend the nighttime meeting that we had and i think that helped a lot i'm glad that that water passed and and that you were able to hold that meeting in the evening part of you know still the largest part of our cost is the MWRA assessment in both budgets and we've seen a lesser increase this year than we've seen in some past years and I know it I missed the catchy phrase there that I know the MWRA advisory board which our city engineer sits on uh elena proax ellis and they've got a catchy catchphrase to try and decrease you know

▶ 3:40:36 Monica C. Medeiros: 2.4 by 24. um and i think they've really taken you know i'm i'm really pleased to see that they've taken an active role in trying to get that number down for the communities because you know as i I think President Search mentioned earlier, this is a utility, this is something that people, homeowners, whether you make loads of money or you make a little bit of money, you need water to drink and you need it to be able to bathe and flush your toilet and all those things. And that's kind of at the forefront. So I want to publicly thank you and thank the MWRA Advisory Board for working, you know, to try to get that down, and — Yeah, the Advisory Board is doing a lot of good things. The Advisory Board is made up of member communities, and our city engineer, Elena Pereira-Casales,

▶ 3:41:35 represents Melrose on that board, and the initial slogan was for no more, meaning no more four percent increases and now they've moved on to 2.4 by 24 meaning in 2024 their goal is to not have increases exceed 2.4 percent we all hope they get there but they are also doing things with the ini program that we will hopefully see in the next three or four months increasing it and also taking money away from communities that don't use it and give it to communities that do use it So there are a lot of things that they do, and I'm glad we have a voice at the table bringing that information back to us so we can plan accordingly. And likewise, as President Search mentioned, I feel the same way about

▶ 3:42:28 Monica C. Medeiros: no longer having a commercial rate, and so if there's an opportunity to look at, we still have the list of the highest the highest using accounts, and many of those are condominiums and apartments, those are still as a whole, they're big users, but as individual units and they're not necessarily as big of, they're not necessarily individually using that much water. So if we could look at something that was for a separate rate for non-residential use And, you know, it may not, you know, the technology advances that we have through GIS and things that we've looked at, you know, in the past, I know I had put forward an order to look at the people per meter, you know, certainly I think we have a lot more options available

▶ 3:43:24 Monica C. Medeiros: to us by all the departments working together, the assessor's office and everything like that that we didn't have a few years ago. So, you know, if we could look at perhaps, you know, something like that or perhaps, again, you know, some kind of non-differential for non-residential use in the future, I would greatly appreciate it. And we do allow condos to individually meter with a master meter. So there are, I think, a handful of larger condo buildings that now have invested in individual meters, and we build the individual meter. but there's a there's a master meter where the water goes into the building itself and any differential between the sum of the individuals is born to the condo association and um we've had a

▶ 3:44:08 lot of positive feedback on that from residents because individually they don't consume a lot they consume a lot as a whole but now they're getting the benefit of being the individual condo owner many of whom have downsized from larger houses so i'm glad we were able to do that and again i have to thank our staff for being creative and finding ways to not only implement it but bill it and monitor it moving forward and i imagine that creates some additional uh indirect costs which which we know have to be borne by the rate so thank you thank you alderman boisseau i just hopefully this is the last question for the evening the chart that you've been using for the rate water bill rate and so forth seven dollars seven

▶ 3:44:58 Robert A. Boisselle: about eight dollars average the proposed 2019 rates above that you have two areas that are colored and you also have a line above that no increase to water-based fees but there seems to be an increase from 2018 to 2019. And the sewer rates go up about $3 to $4. You see the color areas in that box above the? The sewer base fees that are increasing. What is that? The color-coded areas are the part of the rates that are increasing. So on water, the base fees stay the same the changes in volumetric that's the shaded area the six dollars and forty four cents and the eight dollars and seventy five cents when you go over to the right side of the chart the top part is the base fees that are changing on sewer okay so that's so that's

▶ 3:45:58 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: the volume metric so that's increasing about uh from 2018 about um five dollars on the base yes Yes, on the base fee. On the base fee. That's the first quarter. Okay. Very good. Thank you. Thank you, Medicare. Thank you. The order is before you. Motion to move the bottom line. We have a motion to recommend for passage. Sure. Motion to recommend for passage made by Alderman Forbes on 2018-178. Second. Seconded by President Zwirko. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? That will be recommended for passage. Final order before us this evening is order 21. Second. Seconded by President Zwirko. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? final order before us this evening is order 2018-177 proposed FY 19 sewer

▶ 3:46:40 Robert A. Boisselle: rates motion recommend for passage a motion to recommend for passage made by Alderman Forbes second second by President Search on discussion what would be the average increase in the bill in the sewer area it's combined so $7 is the increase that covers both water and sewer okay just want to make sure that's clear thank you very very very based on consumption yeah based on consumption that could range from from what I see here from 620 to 86 bucks right but the majority of Melrose is at 3,000 less less than 2,000 is what you have here for average so spot said about seven seven is your max and decreases as you get lower thank you madam chair thank you the motion has been made and seconded to recommend for passage all in favor aye any opposed I will be

▶ 3:47:41 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: recommended for passage to the full board thank you thank you motion to adjourn madam chair seconded by Alderman Forbes all in favor aye aye

Appropriations & Oversight Committee — 2018-06-07

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