The coming years will deliver painful water and sewer bills to Somerville taxpayers, city staff warned Thursday at a public hearing. That starts with rate increases of 15 percent for each proposed for the fiscal year that starts July 1.
The coming year could have been worse, said Rich Raiche, director of infrastructure and asset management for the city. There were higher increases signaled in recent weeks – an 18 percent hike on the sewer side and 20 percent hike on the water side, brought down by pushing out projects meant to end waste spilling into public waterways after big storms and better bill collection.
“Now we have the people who haven’t been paying their bills giving us the cash so that we don’t have to raise the rates on the people who are,” Raiche said. Fifteen percent is “still quite steep,” he acknowledged. It will mean paying around $413 more for the owners of a single-family home.
The rate increases are largely out of city control, though, due to costs that are imposed on it – including a cost structure to prevent those Combined Sewer Overflows that mayor Jake Wilson is taking to the Legislature as unfair, and a payment structure from the Environmental Protection Agency that is punitive in Greater Boston because it’s based on income averages nationwide that tend to be much lower.
“There’s only one employee in EPA in Boston now, because Trump fired all of them,” but that sole federal worker lives in Greater Boston and understands the high costs, Raiche said. “Federal guidelines are what they are, and we don’t have any means to push back. Over the long term, the capital investment plan that this is pushing us toward are, for some, serious rate hikes.”
Somerville also can’t bicker about its largest single expense: the wholesale bill from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which provides drinking water from the Quabbin Reservoir ($11.5 million) and takes wastewater for treatment on Deer Island ($19.3 million). “We can’t negotiate with the MWRA,” Raiche said.
The city is obligated too to pay off its borrowing on projects such as pipeline rehabilitation and regulatory compliance – another $9.3 million.
“We are an old community, and as part of that, we have an aging infrastructure. You can measure a substantial amount of our underground infrastructure in a presinking-of-the-Titanic era. Some of it is even pre-Civil War,” said Michael Richards, director of finance and administration for Department of Infrastructure and Asset Management and Water and Sewer.
About 90 percent of the city’s water and sewer pipes are more than 50 years old, and 70 percent are more than a century old, Raiche said. “Often the size of the pipe is inappropriate for what our current flows are. There are modern regulatory requirements that they don’t necessarily meet,” Raiche said. “Addressing all of those things is a constant battle, one that had been ignored for many decades in Somerville, and we are now playing catch-up.”
Somerville sees the same higher costs as any consumer when it buys replacement products from vendors, Richards said, and that means rising costs to maintain infrastructure.
Reaching delinquent payers
At least the city has been able to hire – two hard-to-find laborers start Monday, and hiring this year for administrative staff has meant being able to switch residents to quarterly billing; it was three times a year. Charges are now better aligned with the correct account holders, which ends the frustration of ratepayers getting someone else’s bill and allows the city to track down delinquent payers, Richards said,
The city has now collected more than $1.2 million in delinquent bills, Richards said, “necessary funds that we are being charged and assessed by the MWRA for our actual consumption, and it’s our duty to collect those to have a fair and equitable consumption and bill payer impact.”
On the sewer side, that MWRA bill of $19.3 million is expected to go up to $27.5 million because that regional agency also needs to make capital improvement – including Deer Island machinery from the 1990s that requires significant retrofits. For communities such as Somerville, that means a 4 percent year-over-year rate increase over the next 10 years, or a cumulative 42 percent increase, Raiche calculated.
Getting the bill for CSO fixes
The largest pain point again is debt service for fixes to combined sewer overflows for which Cambridge, Somerville and the MWRA are on the hook – costs that “projected out to 2055, would essentially triple our sewer bills,” Raiche said.
It’s unfair in two ways, starting with calculating local costs based on national income levels. The other problem is the apportionment of responsibility from the Clean Water Act passed in 1970: “EPA went around and found every pipe that went out to a river and then assigned a permit to that pipe,” with all permits going to Cambridge, Somerville and the MWRA despite the pipes being shared through communities up to Stoneham or out to Newton. “Because we have these outfall pipes with permits, [we] were the three parties that were assigned to eliminate that pollution.”
“This is an argument that mayor Wilson and I are making at the state level, that that assignment is unfair,” Raiche said. “As you can imagine, none of the state legislators are terribly enthusiastic to share the costs.”
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