June 2011

Water Meeting

l3wis June 20, 2011 12Comments

Against my better judgement, I agreed to go to a meeting with Theresa Stehly, Kermit Staggers and other concerned citizens at city hall to talk about water rates with Public Works Director, Mark Cotter, Water Super, Greg Anderson and Sewer Super, Trent Lubbers. The meeting ended about 30 minutes ago.

Before I get into the meeting itself, and what I took from it, I first want to talk about meeting with our public officials. In defense of Mr. Cotter, he did tell Theresa we had 30 minutes. Also in Mark’s defense we was very polite about it. But while Mark and Greg were discussing the issues with us, Trent kept writing little notes, fidgeting and making faces. Sorry, Trent, but we pay you, (Almost $94,000 a year) you have to hear us out. I found his behavior unacceptable, but not surprising. Like little kids in a sandbox they like to pout when they don’t get their way. I don’t think we took anything away from them except about 35 minutes that we are ultimately paying them for anyway. The meeting actually cost me 60 cents in parking meter fees.

The MEETING

I actually learned a few things, but mostly some things were confirmed to me that I already knew about;

• There IS a sliding scale on water rates based on conservation (still not sure how it works)

• The philosophy before watering restrictions were put into place was, SELL AS MUCH WATER AS POSSIBLE!

Conservation is a good thing and while the 3 directors bragged about conservation it was confusing because they are charging us higher rates because we need to fix infrastructure? Huh? If we are using less water, shouldn’t our rates be lower because of less stress on infrastructure? Seems like we are paying for the sins of the past.

• As Kermit put it to me after the meeting. “The city is essentially penalizing us for conserving.” See, while Greg bad mouthed the old way of doing things, selling as much water as possible, he was unable to show us that conservation is saving us any money.

• I brought up the 2nd penny and how it should be used for infrastructure. Theresa also brought up several ‘unneeded’ projects in the city that the 2nd penny is paying for, which got an interesting response from both Cotter and Anderson, “You’ll to talk to those departments about that.” So it seems each department fights like a bunch of little kids over rootbeer hard candy thrown from floats at a parade. Shouldn’t these departments be working together on the CIP budget (which they do). So why did they try to make it sound like they don’t?

• Lewis & Clark. According to Greg, L & S has cost us $84 million so far. L & S is their biggest argument as to why our rates need to increase. So as we were getting up to leave I asked them, “When will we use L & S to it’s fullest capacity?” Greg told me that L & S is really expensive and is only for emergency reasons (no kidding it is expensive, we have dumped $84 million into it and haven’t got a drop of water). Mark laid out that they will use more of the water each year gradually, with NO date when we will be using it to full capacity, if ever. And here is the crux of the water rate increase. Our rates are being increased to pay principal and interest on a pipe we don’t have yet, and when we do get it we won’t use. Huh?

I didn’t want to get into the tax shifting and the events center during the meeting, even though Theresa touched on it. I hopefully will get a chance to talk about that at the council meeting tonight. Item #32.