City Council — 2019-05-06
Agenda
- Call to Order
- ORDER-2019-84 : Joint Meeting of the Board of Aldermen and the School Committee to be held at 7:15 p.m. on Monday, May 6, 2019, in the Aldermanic Chamber, City Hall, Melrose, MA, on the Financial Condition of the City, revenue and expenditure forecasts, and other relevant information in preparation of the FY2020 Operating Budget
- Public Comment
- Adjournment
Transcript
▶ 0:00 Good evening. Good evening everyone. I call to order this special joint meeting of the Melrose Board of Aldermen and the Melrose School Committee as required by the city charter in order to hear from the, her honor, the mayor for the FY20 budget. Madam Clerk, if you could call the role of the Board of Aldermen. Alderman Bewtra. Here. Alderman Boisselle. here alderman forbes here alderman Letter garabedian here alderman mcmaster here alderman medeiros alderman mortimer here alderman Tramontozzi here alderman wright here alderman Zwirko here president lemmerman here ten present ten present is a quorum of the board of alderman and madam clark if you would please call the roll for the school committee
▶ 0:55 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: mr. Selm here miss Driscoll here miss McAndrew here mr. Obramski miss Ratsy Thomas here chairman O'Connell here and that constitutes a quorum for the school committee I would also note the presence of the superintendent school Cindy Tamar as per our city charter and as is our custom let us stand for the pledge allegiance one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all there is one item on our agenda this evening it's order 2019-84 joint meeting of the Board of Aldermen and the school committee to be held at 7 15 p.m. on Monday May 6 2019 in the aldermanic chamber City Hall Melrose Massachusetts on the financial condition of the city revenue and expenditure forecasts and other relevant information in preparation of the FY 2020 operating
▶ 2:00 Gail Infurna: budget we are joined here this evening as I said by her honor mayor Inferna which we would like to invite up to the podium at this time honorable board of aldermen and members of the school committee one year ago when I gave my fiscal 2019 budget address I came before you with serious concerns about the city's finances today I am happy to present a budget that is both both balanced and sustainable instead of a budget that cuts millions of dollars from city services this budget is balanced and maintains the current level of services in our library our Council on Aging Memorial Hall our Police Department and other services that our residents depend on this is possible because just four weeks ago the citizens of Melrose voted to pass the
▶ 3:07 Gail Infurna: override giving us the opportunity to stabilize the school budget and meet the needs of our growing student population which in turn has saved our community from drastic cuts of city services let me say first of all that I am grateful to the community for their engagement in the override discussion they learned about our budget process they participated in the questionnaire the listening forums the question-and-answer sessions we held and they even stopped me on Main Street to tell me they had read my blog and our newspaper articles and finally they made the choice to invest in our future of Melrose I am also grateful to the department heads and all our city employees for their dedication and professionalism during this period of extreme uncertainty while
▶ 4:02 Gail Infurna: we were asking them to look at a worst-case scenario and figure out what services would have to be limited with limited with severe budget cuts they also continued to manage the daily operations of the city they put in countless hours making sure that our residents did not see any interruption and service while taking on the extra burden of determining what could and could not be cut thank you tonight the picture is much brighter than it was a year ago this budget will include the funds we need to move our schools forward we will be able to return the district to full staffing levels at the middle school and the high school and hire additional staff to accommodate our growing enrollment we will be able to pay for the equipment and infrastructure
▶ 4:54 Gail Infurna: we need to accommodate our new students and we will be able to improve teacher pay and teacher retention on the city side of the budget you will see the services have been for the most part level funded we have been able to add critically needed school nurse position at the middle school high school campus and a custodian for the library. In addition, this budget includes full funding for the police and fire contracts. I will make a recommendation to this board that you make no increase to water volumetric rates as well as sewer volumetric rates and water-based fees this year, and that you make slight adjustment to the sewer base fee which translates into approximately $5 per quarter on the average water bill we are able to stabilize these rates
▶ 5:53 Gail Infurna: because of the many years of work on the on the hard work on the part of the water and sewer rate committee and this board in the upcoming months we will continue to invest in our water and sewer infrastructure using MWR rate the MWRA interest free loan programs to reduce leaks into and out of the system we will continue to review the city budget looking for areas where we can manage our resources more effectively this year we did a survey of all the city's vehicles from police cruises to DPW trucks so we can set up a replacement schedule that will save us money on both purchases and repairs. I'm also excited to announce that the capital improvement planning committee will reconvene this month with John Tramatozzi as the aldermanic
▶ 6:48 Gail Infurna: representative and chairman Ed O'Connell representing the school committee. This committee will look at all our capital needs throughout the city including school buildings roofing projects windows and such as so we can prioritize our capital projects as you know the override closed the funding gap in our schools that had existed for years which forced us to use one-time money to fund the school budget we will now be able to tackle critical city vehicle needs and and pay for them with one-time money, which is the right way to do it. We will also continue to explore ways to bring in new revenue. But here is what we're not going to do. We are not going to support a 40B project dropped into green space far from public transit.
▶ 7:42 Gail Infurna: And please allow me a little leeway here. In the past, I have supported smart growth developments that have brought in additional revenue without impacting the environment. However, I want to make it very clear that I do not support the proposed 40B development off Swains Pond Avenue. This is not beneficial to our city or to our current residents. The potential new residents would be isolated from public transit and unable to enjoy living in a walkable city. We will continue to seek out responsible development and by that I mean development that makes sense for this city and does not encroach on green space or destroy wetlands here are a few other ways in which we will continue to seek out new resource new sources of
▶ 8:32 Gail Infurna: revenue we will continue to seek outside funding for projects such as the complete street program we will continue to encourage our department heads to apply for grants throughout the fiscal year. We will continue to look at green energy initiatives. We will continue to explore opportunities for regionalization, and we will also work with Melrose-Wakefield Health Care, which has made a number of investments in this community over the years. While we anticipate additional revenue from recreational marijuana, we have not included it in the budget because we don't have any data to make projections in my state of the city address in January I spoke of the ways in which our budget was no longer matching our values we were funding the schools at the bare
▶ 9:26 Gail Infurna: minimum required by the state experienced teachers were leaving the school system and the art supply budget had been cut to six dollars per student our library was in danger of losing accreditation if we reduced its funding any further we were unable to meet the infrastructure needs of our city I used the analogy of a house that shows more and more signs of neglect over the years the grass becomes overgrown the paint starts to peel a window is broken and soon it is in disrepair today I am proud to say that our house is in order today our budget does match our values today we are able to provide the school department with the funds they need and with our budget stabilized we are able to look positively to the future thank you thank you ma'am
▶ 10:41 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: Fair enough. Madam President, I make a motion to open the floor for public comment. We have a motion made by Alderman Mortimer to open the floor for public comment. Is there a second? Second. Seconded by Alderman Forbes. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? This is the portion of our joint meeting when any member of the public may come forward to speak on the item on our agenda. Are there any members of the public wishing to speak? Good evening. Hi, good evening. I'm Jerry Morose. have a few comments regarding what the mayor just said number one you know the high school had taken the brunt of underfunding for years and years and years and even the proposed override doesn't begin to offset that you know
▶ 11:38 there were so many things that were rationalized and then accepted as as being fine at the high school we can take away this and take away this and take away this the high school is not at all competently staffed for the benefit of the students you know according to the chapter 70 formula premises you know as I recall middle schools were middle school funding was based on a class size of 25 students per class elementary was based in a class size of 22 students per class and high schools were based on a class size of 17 students per class and the idea is that high schools have to have more specialized classes you're not going to have one class for 25 kids everywhere that you can as you do in the
▶ 12:28 middle school and the the proposed budget doesn't really address that issue very well at all the issue of mixed levels of classes doesn't work for so many kids it's not helpful at the same time at the larger level you know the school committee voted on a budget again this year that I believe isn't meeting the school committee's obligations for establishing policy I've said this in a number of forums over the years but for the school committee to say you know take this many million dollars and give it to the superintendent for personnel and take this many million dollars and give it to the superintendent for everything but personnel that's not establishing any policy the same what you might spend money on but it's not saying what that money is going to do
▶ 13:12 the school committee has an obligation you know there was revenue ruling in 1994 from the DOR that established a school committee has to set its policies it can't defer its obligations or transfer its obligations to anybody else to do that I would hope that the school committee when they consider their budget would go a step further than what they have done and actually say to the superintendent this is what we want to get out of our schools or to fund this application of resources in our schools toward this end and whether you define it by high school or middle school or elementary or by some other metric or something there ought to be some policy expression by the school committee at the same time we have the changing topics the issue of water and sewer yes
▶ 13:59 the mayor is proposing not to increase the volumetric rate this year but that's because we're already over billing the residents of Melrose by more than a million dollars a year and they're just collecting money in the water and sewer retained earnings and reserve funds that reflects that at the same time with all the money that they've taken in and held we're not doing the ratepayers the water and sewer ratepayers of Melrose any favors by holding that money and not spending it on sewer inflow and infiltration and I remember coming here probably six years ago, and I had a graph that showed that, and I only made the graph be about the Middlesex League towns, but we were at the top of the Middlesex League in how leaky our sewer
▶ 14:42 pipes were, in the idea that sewer pipes that are leaky don't actually leak sewerage into the ground, they typically leak groundwater into the sewer. So as I believe it is today, we are still, actually as I know it is today, we are still the leakiest sewer pipes in the MWRA, and this is a chart that you can't all see, but please accept that the red line at the top is the infiltration and inflow of Melrose biometric that the Water Association uses called gallons per day of leakage per inch diameter mile of sewer pipe. We are far and above more than the average, which is the yellow line here of the MWRA, and please know that the way the MWRA rate structures are set, that this hurts us considerably and one significant rainstorm event a year can
▶ 15:34 put us over the edge to hurt our sewer rates for three full years because they're done on the highest month per year on a three-year average for some of the sewer rate structure. This is unacceptable and the mayor in her in her talk earlier said that you know she's going to use the interest-free funding from the MWRA to work on it, well, guess what? Other communities do that too. And another aspect of the MWRA rate structure with sewer is that, and with water, is you pay your percentage of the system. And so if we're continuing to use a high percentage of the system relative to everybody else, and then we reduce accordingly with them, we're still at the top of the system. If back in 2013 and 2014 and 2015 we had invested in sewer infiltration and inflow efforts,
▶ 16:32 we would be reaping the rewards of that now and having a lower percentage relative to the rest of the communities and that would help our rate payers. Yes we have some huge problems in our sewer system and yes we can get some large returns on the initial investments, and we've already gotten a few based on the few investments we did back in 2016-17. But the reality is, is that we're taking all kinds of extra money from the rate payers, the city's holding it in the bank, doing nothing with it, and on the water side, we don't have a reason to hold any of that money. We don't even have real large infrastructure that we would have a crisis on at any point in time. We don't have an aquifer to protect.
▶ 17:15 We don't have pumping systems, large-scale pumping systems. We have a couple of small pressure booster systems. We don't have water towers. We don't have a treatment plant. We don't have any of those large things that could fail and cause a problem that would be significant. There's no reason to hold $750,000 in reserve for water every year. Plus, we have, again, all the retained earnings from FY18, and we expect to have a huge retained earnings from FY19. I believe that keeping the volumetric rates the same for water is pretty much, you know, kind of slapping it to the rate payers of Melrose. You've taken way extra money from them. You don't need it. You ought to be giving it back and reducing the water volumetric rates.
▶ 18:01 one other issue about water rates before i move back over to sewer is that the base rates that we have on our water system and our sewer system don't anywhere near reflect the fixed costs of our system and it is a failure of policy to rely so much on a volumetric rate which can fluctuate based on cool and wet summers that that's when we get into trouble and we need to increase our fixed charges and we can lower our volumetric rate you can keep the net cost to people this year even the same or less if you use the money appropriately on the sewer side there is so much money there i would like to see it invested tomorrow in making improvements in the infiltration and inflow and i want to be clear that on inflow
▶ 18:51 there is some benefit to inflow for money but really the people who have sump pumps that are that are connected to the sewer system, it doesn't take money to deal with that. It takes a public relations campaign. And I have asked the city for five, six years now to start a public relations campaign to get people to stop hooking up or to look and see that their sump pump might be connected to the sewer system and to eliminate that. Back in the 1980s when MWRA was starting to build out its system, I managed properties in towns all over here that we were actually asked to do audits of our properties and be sure that we didn't have any connections from roof drains down into into properties that some pumps didn't go there and um everybody but
▶ 19:34 Melrose did those things 30 years ago we still haven't even asked residents or even told residents do you know that you're really not supposed to be having a sump pump go into the sewer system that's one element of inflow and and by the way inflow in our system I believe is about 20 percent of our total um inflow infiltration um the other 80 percent is infiltration itself which is what the investment in sewer pipes can benefit us. A few years back, I had a spreadsheet where I did some analysis, and if we had just reduced our infiltration and inflow by 50%, as I recall, and I will look this up before the next meeting, but that it would have saved us after the three-year averaging period about $667,000
▶ 20:15 a year on our sewer rates. That's a lot of money that right now we're just giving away the MWRA. And one other piece of data I want to give you, as I recall that this is for the 2017 calendar year, you know, 58% of the water, of the wastewater that we sent to MWRA, 58% did not flow through our sinks and drains and toilets and showers and tubs. 58% of the water came from inflow and infiltration. Now if we want to be green and energy conscious, we should understand that we are wasting huge amounts of resources by letting all that water flow into our system and then to harm the MWRA efforts to remove all the regular sewerage with all that excess water. And when we have large rain events, we are among the worst in the whole area.
▶ 21:14 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: Thank you for your time. hand this to the clerk so you'll all have that on record but again Melrose is at the top of the list we are two point two seven standard deviations above the norm and this is where the average of the MWRA is thank you thank you mr. Morris are there any other members in the public wishing to speak motion to close public comment madam president second we have a motion to close public comment made by Alderman Mortimer second by Alderman Boisselle all in favor any opposed well the comment is now closed we have a motion to adjourn so moved second we have a motion to adjourn made by alderman mortimer seconded by alderman forbes all in favor any opposed we are now adjourned thank you everyone