West Stockbridge — Residents now have an additional event to calendar for the holiday month: a Town Meeting on December 16. The unanimous decision to call the meeting was made by the full Select Board—including newcomer Tobias Casey—during the group’s November 24 meeting. The warrant will encompass three articles pertaining to remedying the town’s water and sewer system budget issues, action that Finance Committee Chair Robert Salerno told the dais is required for the Commonwealth to approve its upcoming tax rate.
According to Salerno, the town’s sewer system was constructed in the early 1980s and the corresponding treatment plant’s capacity was designed to accommodate a maximum of half of the service it currently processes. At some point during its history and because the program did not have many subscribers, the town agreed for its general fund coffers to be used for capital improvements to the system while the system users would pay operating costs. The rates and responsibility for the system lie with the West Stockbridge Water and Sewer Commission.
In the last few years, user fees have not been able to keep up with those increasing operating costs, creating a shortfall within the sewer system’s budget despite a reserve fund that was set aside to cover unanticipated charges, Salerno said. However, “from a sewer point of view, that fund is empty, they used it up,” he said. Additionally, the aging sewer plant has incurred increasingly more difficult and costly repairs in its 40-plus-year life span. The Water and Sewer Commission raised its fees last February, but that increase “was too little, too late,” Salerno said.
The reserves for the town’s water system still maintain a retained earnings balance.
Representatives of the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Division of Local Services—that oversees the town’s finance and approves its budget—discussed the issues with the town’s Finance Committee.
“They basically put the hammer down and said, ‘It’s time,’ and would not approve our tax rate given the current financial structure of our water and sewer [system],” Salerno said of the conversation he had on November 20 with state staffers. “They were very pleasant but very insistent that they want us to fix the current problem and also what [we are] going to do going forward before they will approve our tax rate.”
If the tax rate is not approved, tax bills cannot be submitted out to residents next month.
The Finance Committee held a November 21 joint session with the town’s Water and Sewer Commission, with both committees recommending that the Select Board immediately call a Special Town Meeting “to correct the situation,” Salerno said. The meeting will focus on three articles for residents to approve: to cover a $25,000 sewer system’s operating shortfall from free cash; to cover a $49,000 water system’s shortfall from that program’s $170,000 in retained earnings; and to cover a $35,000 expenditure from free cash to fund an engineering study aimed at identifying future sewer plant issues.
Should the measure come to a town vote in May, the move forward to resolve the water and sewer problems would be at a six-month disadvantage, Salerno said. “We want to get it done sooner rather than later because the cost of this stuff is not going down, it’s going up,” he said.
