that we've done too much too so we had also modified the budget for this fiscal year to to include more reserve funding and lower septic revenue to that was one hundred seventy five thousand dollar number so what happened with that is we did reduce the budget but when we redid the e r years people on the lower end saved money people in the middle may have gone up or down within fifty dollars order people on the eye and ended up getting in yet another higher bill and i think a lot of people are questioning how could they get a higher bill after the board cut sixty for water was three hundred sixty five dollars and for water with for seventy five with an assailant and then for waste water it was five hundred seventy five dollars and seven dollars per thousand gallons so that was in july where we counted everybody to the nearest whole number divided by forty one and a half thousand gallons so we had five hundred thirty units on the water side and four hundred ninety three units on the wastewater side  so that's what the first bill that went out under this new paradigm looked like when we did the budget adjustments and we went to half unit calculations meaning everybody was now going to be divided by thirty six and a half hours and rounded to the nearest half number what we've got were four hundred eighty units of water at three hundred seventy five dollars per unit so basically only a ten dollar increase with the reduction in overall units and  zero and four fifty per thousand gallons versus four seventy five under the previous bill on the wastewater side it was five hundred seventy versus five seventy five and six seventy five versus seven dollars so there was you know it remained about the same overall the value of the ear you and the value of per thousand gallons but what was different is now we have fewer units to divide them by and we chose that because he wanted to do h we and the goal was to help those at the bottom who didn't use as much water that's that was the goal of and we knew that by lowering those at the bottom it like it is pretty close to seventy thirty on the fixed variable charge extremes in terms of suggestions one extreme was take the budget divided by the number of users and everybody gets a flat fee the other extreme was take the number of gallons divided by the expenses and everybody gets those are the two ends of the spectrum you can't do both they are not they're not consistent and what we have done is landed somewhere between which is a combination of units based on some fixed cost and july two thousand and twelve to june two thousand and fourteen usage ok so if you used less than group here sorry yeah june july two thousand and twelve to june two thousand and thirteen so that calendar year that that fiscal year essentially the last fiscal year so whatever you use during that fiscal year and it may be difficult for you to find it unless you saved all of your bills and added i love is is that chart refers to that so if you use less than twenty seven three seventy five you were point five if you use between turn twenty seven three seventy five and whatever the next step is basically you're going to take whatever you use for the last fiscal year divided by three six thirty six thousand five hundred and which what's your account number again but just made clear to people that got this yeah i mean even though our bills don't have so it's last year's you write on it right so you know your and your current usage may be different which which brings into the challenge of if we do it on a quarterly basis you know i mean for example harrington's during summer uses a ten percent of what they use during the winter so so that fluctuation will result in significant fluctuations and saying that the school the school uses significantly less water during the summer than they do obviously when they're in session so that a result in significant fluctuations and in rates which i think that's what we're we're we're hearing right now is that there is reaction to these to these chain well to the most recent increases and so that that will result in significant increases on a on a quarterly basis so  thank you for the suggestion and i know we've considered it already i think right now because we have done so many changes in the past couple of months to to prove that i don't want to throw the baby out the bathwater here  i think we need to figure out how to fix what what's happening right now we examine different different scenarios for the next year i just want just straight up per gallon charge for everybody and we looked at the comparison and you know i kind of i kind of took out a dozen or so sample can sample users and systems to see which scenario w groceries and then the folks at the bottom would essentially you know be subsidizing everybody else because of their using such a small percentage but if you do not have priorities of both but if you divide everybody if you divide all of the revenue spike thirty three hundred thirty four connections and then you have a higher base charge than you're dealing with right now and that the water just felt like that was egregious and felt like that was not political and that was not sustainable so they didn't recommend that they recommended based on online and even distribution of costs based on usage so you know if you have not changed anything you have been kept everything the same and just increase the value of that unit is the people who are living in five bedroom unit five bedroom home to use ten thousand gallons  fair and while this has been very difficult and hours and hours spent looking at the numbers and looking at spreadsheets and doing scenarios and doing analysis is is this was this was the best that we could come up with given the situation and given the fact that we didn't have any time to phase this and we the bills were due on june two thousand and twelve and we needed to make a change in order to make sure that we were being fiscally hollering and for the panel to figure this out clear enough for the customer base i think it's clear that we outside of town help it's how we deal with ourselves as a community and i've said this over and over again and please go back to the video and listen to me again i'm not through even computer illiterate is so the contributions to capital to try to to try to help with with the costs now at an up note as i think we've said before prior to two thousand and twelve this water system had no debt no d at all and the and that and the investment in the water system has been the result of that debt but if any of us and of course how we do it every day is like our positive suggestion or idea of how to get here can we use this lon exactly where we were going where i was going when i started to explore the i or so fire rating of the state and started to look at the national site where it looks to me like no time to have a reading under it goes from one to ten them water system but just to be clear that's what i know about my house i don't know that it's true for the entire town i am not able to access the entire island so mapping systems you see ratings around town to see how it does impact every household there apparently is a map which is only accessible to certain government officials and fire teachers where you can see the ratings so i can get into this but got the bills they did but one of the big impacts of restructuring the raids was also shifting costs between different kinds of users as we've talked about here the big one that nobody's sorry but that's i'm not i don't count that because i'm going through ok it's taking money out of one pocket putting it back in the other for the system for what happens when the schools pay their water change one thing that that that gets out at you is that our yes and sichem s together paid about forty thousand dollars before we made any changes and today they pay about forty thousand dollars ok well this is this is a question and it has to do with moving to a more volume based system when we were listening and more moving is part of the saying you know towards a system that where what you paid was more what we did based on people were actually using the schools charges went down because proportionally they were they were using  so the problem there is that is that as as everybody i think has said and as i've said in prior meetings there's a value to the town of having a water system in place that  the people like me who live in town that are in the system get the benefit of that are paying workers without paying for the water system having the schools paid more than their share is a way of building that of making that that even i believe and frankly it's a lot easier thing going to and played in the battle in town meeting every year because what we know from the past is that attempts to go to the town as a whole and have a town make allocations of water system have not been successful ok so i'm thinking about this politically now and i met with john dreamy from the superintendent this afternoon to talk about this and and he saw well basically stepping back for a second if if the tell if this if we had charged the schools proportionally they would have gone from forty thousand dollars to sixty thousand twenty thousand dollars probably probably a little bit more than that increase  now that is not enough to wipe out all the effects that all of you are feeling but it but it would help if we did that now it basically is taking a bit of a crisis away from you all and putting it in the schools as their budget for the summer and they have no way to generate twenty thousand dollars out of nowhere but the way we left it was to talk about this for the for the coming year and we haven't as as you heard before we don't talk except in front of you all and i'm bringing this here now tonight because i think it's a it's a way to go and i think we've got to find things like that it's not going to be one magic bullet it's going to be looking at all at a series of these things that we build the system out because that's digging the hole deeper but to put more users on the system as it is and if we can do that if we can if we can do that and we partner so we can do in fill in the village every additional user doesn't  meet paying me still but yet it's being pushed onto us so i know people are not attacking you it's just that we all live you know we're paying our bills we're trying to do what we can do will and it's just that when it jumps so high and we have that money budget because you know you get x number you know salary paid out so what are the long term situation because we're not going to get big business to come to richmond because no one's going to want to pay this one you know personal by having users to the system every dish will user and it will lower the cost for everybody else that's the way out of this in the long term so you know i mean i i  community swimming pool or something like that that's years down the road you know we don't have years to wait for sure what we're doing and it can be i can tell you that the economic committee economic development committee is working on building up certainly would not encourage them to go into one but i can tell you that that we have we have discussed policy changes in in general to the to the policies that this that this was the water resources department has and one of them has come and it's worked so far until but that is not until now not so you know that that will be a policy that i do believe that this commission will be discussing over the next couple of months now the ramifications of that are house people so i'm your guy say by now using the water should pay the bill or should pay a twenty dollars well it's not affecting me but i don't think that's the right answer i think you are right answer what i have a problem with guy uses five gallons of water he has basically based on that house being sold and that house being fully occupied and then i heard a few minutes ago that seventy to eighty percent of the costs are fixed c when when the rates are going up forty percent again it's not affecting me because i feel like thomas but i think this one hundred units are being built half unit i think that's doesn't make sense in in in numbers i'd like to for you guys review korea i just want to have to point out that that the reason why so many people's bills doubled was because the rate doubled so in two thousand and twelve the rate was a hundred seventy four dollars so going to three sixty was was a doubling and and we were very clear with with the users and multiple mailings and most every meeting we had is rates are going to go up rates are going to go up rates are going to double this is what has to happen in order for us to make our revenue projections make our budget projections is is that we weren't smoke and mirrors here we were we were very clear in what the one big thing is  so the current budget does not include the new water tank the new water change is something that we need we talked about the need for it we've talked about the need for it size we've also talked about the fact that it's not it's not going to construction today it's not going to construction tomorrow it's likely to go to construction in the next year or two which will give us a year probably of construction so that's we're now three years out and our first payment would not s for two years after construction completes we're talking five years from now and in our budget currently is a five year note for ground support for almost twenty thousand dollars so in five years that will go away which means  hopefully the tank that decade it will come down at x amount of dollars now depending on the funding program that that this number comes from and i've heard numerous times under state grants out there can at the federal government help us out that we want free money is the program that i work and we've secured our place in the funding line to secure a low interest long term rate for to to to fix that tank and and in all likelihood it will be a thirty year loan not a twenty year like we would get out of the bond market and all likelihood it would be at a very advantageous user interest rate i doesn't get nailed down until the final check is written but in all likelihood there will be some inferior grant money associated with that so at the end of the year at the end of the calculation is the annual debt payment will be slightly more than the twenty thousand that are built into the budget for ground support and in so these are the cities and then the these are things that this decision makers have to deal with is is mr moore and pointed out is the system has to be designed for the usage that people expect and  the cost of that usage needs to be spread out quickly among everybody who's who's chooses to use the water in the way that they choose to use it and this is what we've this is what we've come up with as as kendis is there any way you know how often do we run into the broken meter overcounting or it would seem more common that they just stop counting when they break my ears and in my thirty years i have never run across the meter to read  running which we do have but i'm going to just serve in our seats now let's say that you hire people who with engineering certification it and didn't want to estimate how many hours they put into this in the last year i mean i don't good so we certainly could hire an engineering firm to do this sort of work what they are going to do is they're going to do is they're going to look at the numbers and they're going to look at what new folks and then they're going to give it to us and say here you go here's our analysis to do with it what you want and then we're going to have to make a decision based on that and the engineering firm gets to be like and we we have to still suffer the consequences whatever they may be  still have to answer to you folks coming to the meetings and saying wait so just because the engineering firms that if that's the way to do it we should do it and i mean i guess at that point we could just say yes sorry and move on but but that's not that's not what we want to do we continue to have public comment we continue to have weekly meetings so that we can listen to what you're saying in this if we can try to fix it that's what we did and accept early september meetings we listened to the two what potential expenses are for the next at least five years and we do have capital budgeting that we do on an annual basis see what sort of projects are ahead of us which is why we have a some would say a rope a more robust than necessary capital reserve fund based on the rates that we have now but i think all of us would agree that that we need it because because that's what that's how we fixed our system for many years so i can hear it right my predecessor what i did feel that past meeting the committee was very receptive to any ideas that were presented that were out of the box i can also understand that  trying to answer your second question sucrose question thank you i'm i'm i'm glad to hear that and i had a feeling that was happening but i'm glad that now those who are here marching understand that we don't just blindly kind of it so i have i mean i have to kind of looked at what what different kind of analysis that we've that we've looked at what the person thousand gallon would be what if it was whole year use what if we didn't change the way we were calculating the bills but if we went to half what if we split it up sixty forty instead of seventy thirty what if we split up twenty instead of seven thirty but if it's under what if we you know all these like hundreds of scenarios and so i have i have it based on what everybody's bill would look at under different scenarios and i pulled out like i said a dozen so a couple of low single family homes one in the middle an apartment harrington's to scanners the r market and the schools to see what kind of scenario would do to and this is what we would take into consideration when we were looking at which option to choose is who would be difference is the reason why we were over is because there are a number of accounts that are allocation only for example the creamery the creamery is they pay only allocation so they don't actually use any water they're reserving the right to use water and we decided just to take that out of the calculation and out the problem ustream because they could drop it so we didn't want to at the end of the year come up short because we  it that's great that's going to capital but if we don't get at least wouldn't be surprised any projections on something that we need not get because the highs people can drop their allocation words previously we didn't do that you had allocated units that it explain the math the charge is as i've already said almost two hours ago is not correct it's your bill that's correct so we need to upgrade the charge i think we need to eliminate the chart  it's confusing yes there are we so you can talk with well i say we go to canada first because it would be your meter reading and then we divide that by thirty six and a half thousand gallons you're all right  but i know there's been a point of contention in the house about essentially designing a special rate for her and i should give you a little bit more background on my contention with the superintendent that you know so the  sides there are different rage structures for different classes of users and how those classes traditionally i mean are you thinking residential and nonresidential or taken residential public business  and the huge majority is ensuring that we're almost everybody is there are three that are high users the elementary school and all the wastewater treatment and then there's like thirteen that are sort of in the middle that are all businesses  it includes herring tim is the restaurants daycare center you know so that there when i just look at use there are almost three classes already there the business is in the middle of residential at the see the logic for that so this is as much of a political more actually of a political and economic concern that is of an engineering concern because to serve the schools it when you actually talk about what the cost is for kendall to provide water to the schools and to provide sewer service it costs less per gallon than for anybody else it's just the way it goes there are sick on his of scale right i'm proposing that we charge them more per gallon than anybody else and the reason is because it's a way of distributing appropriately the share of the cost of the system to not just richmond which would be the case with our yes but to the towns that send their kids to see agents which is by far the largest i would justify the well i think you do it on the basis of all of them are the things that people brought up here tonight that there are benefits that accrue to me and all the other non users that live in town from having a thriving town and you need to have water to something i don't disagree with you all but i'm but i'm saying just my personal opinion about  to get to a substantive next step again so i think we should continue to negotiate that with the superintendent around the school budget so i think we should continue them very sort of the lead on that kind of do that by de facto or should we meet with like two of us meet with yeah what we can't do more than two good read anybody else who wants to should be so i'd be willing to do that the other thing i'm sorry the chief left i would like to see the actual fire protection rating them for the test because while the town need not go from a nine to a six it appears that the entire time it's gone from a ten twenty nine which has its mind or stand it some financial value to the people who are not within a thousand feet so i think there's two there's three plants yes there are people who are on the system there are people within thousand feet of a hybrid who are not on the system and last i knew it was counted this the crow flies so you could be a thousand feet even if your quarter mile b road and then there's the third class people are not within a thousand feet but goes from a ten rating point nine review which would appear to have a financial benefit to people who are not users so from my yet and i think that that is going to require more than the ten minutes we have left divina allocated time so that maybe pete could be in the loop with the chief judge you and i just because i think we start with the facts well what's issue for richmond because it's smaller and it and there are actually different school districts there may be the possibility to increase the charge if we wanted to do so for staging mass in the shorter term but probably not issue i have to change and i agree with cost basically written making they didn't take precedent into account and what we have was for better or worse i believe the social contract where about ten percent of the syste carried by the school before and we went to said and that's a big change that's there are towns also that have different rates structures are tax structures it's arbitrary but there are some times that have a higher tax rate for mental property owner occupied property it is possible why did they do that somewhere arbitrary but it's because they believe that the owner of the rental properties are somehow more evil to sustain so these are the types of things that will be considered as we look to the new to the next budget cycle into then the next year you think we are you know i don't think the next billing calculations cycle which will come up in the spring big question about that shadow which is the same thing this is nothing to do that we're just talking about but i spent a lot of fun with your excellent spreadsheet over the weekend and i have some questions about man ok and if those i think probably the rather than trying to handle that now you and i should sit down and look at that but if those were to resolve if you and i both can agree with it over here we want to change the map and that way when and how with that flow through into that nobody knows when that kicks in because it's somewhere in the middle between the year use i thought the calculation was it was rounded up or down you know like one point seven six goes up at one point seven says there's always going to be some some jump in you go one gallon over and you're the next one up you know unless we go back to the allocated units and we've already decided we're not going that yet and i understand that i think maintained five hundred thirty units but divided our necessary revenue by five hundred thirty as opposed to four hundred so the difference would have been i guess what i'm doing that and we probably should leave  this were a little in the weeds yeah this is i'm pushing back a little bit i think we've had a little bit of that tied to i mean i i am totally behind the idea of providing some specific relief to the to the lowest volume users  you know short of means testing which are not ready to gauge it yet but i think we will have the pendulum swung swung too far in that direction that we need to go back to little bit and so you would propose something which made sense to me if you would actually need it and review how the grounding works now if we come back for me if my it goes down to now it's just not just what are the are used but what does it mean for cash money if i go from one point five x dollars and i move to two  seven three seven five you would be point five hear you and that meant you're you payment is this combined is yeah this was a so worth seven to fifty plus usage ok twenty six you work one year you and you were and you paid nine forty five per year plus usage ok if you used between forty five thousand six twenty seven and sixty three thousand eight seventy seven you were one point five year you missed and then you paid one thousand four hundred seventeen dollars and fifty cents plus usage and it kind of goes on now the reality is that most zero they would be i believe eleven units and it would be ten thousand more right because they used three hundred eighty five thousand gallons last year which means they're the fourth largest user home that's right in the middle thirty thousand two hundred gallons per year based on the old on the old calculations they would have been paying about eight hundred fifty dollars a year under the new calculations they're paying thirteen seventy time they would be one year you and they were one before just so were just so we're clear on that and then i have i have a very low water user which under the old was they were paying one point six seven units their bill was five hundred fifty dollars their new one at point five is five hundred sixty dollars so keep in mind they went from paying almost two base units to now paying half because their usage on an annual basis is seventy eight hundred gallons so this is kind of how we kept everything the same their bill would have doubled to a thousand dollars a year while using basically the smallest amount of water these are things we had to kind of deal with you know vs so for example harrington's at their manufacturing facility they used three hundred thousand gallons a year last year their bill in two thousand and twelve was six thousand gallons six thousand dollars their bill amount of money that people were paying versus what other people were paying so that single family home who was using seventy eight hundred gallons of water was paying almost six hundred dollars a year and harrington's using like one hundred times it is paying six thousand souping ten times as much it's the balance was all over the place and this is some of the inequities that once you got into the numbers and you started to look and see where it was you're like and this is really up you know i mean like wasn't it wasn't fair to the to the middle east to the middle and elementary school is are so fundamentally if we think of this is zero sum game with end users as long as we're trying to generate this fixed my revenue the more i charge one person or the less with kind of choosing or that kind of thinking how we are going to put it into the budget in a way that is defensible and acceptable and i think that in fair and i think the consensus is this mission is ok but for the for the bill that just went out is there anything is there anything that we can end or want to do about well that's my question just from looking through and seeing the ones that jumped right you know looking that's affecting their variable charge that's a very affecting the amount that goes through the meter which is causing the bill to go up it's not the base charge that's going to come into our  ok so individual grievances i think we need to deal with on a one on one basis if we can really figure out if it's if it's maybe a daycare or if it's if it's a miss entry and a spreadsheet or if it's actual consumption and that way we can really kind of figure out where are his shoes are designed does that sound fair and ok so if you could please submit it in writing ok too town manager we well let's just it's just a collection spot i'm not saying the judge has to deal with them individually because i'm not going to make them do that they're going to research yes exactly so individual grievances so that we can research and figure out what's going on because if you're right we're human we may have made entry errors we may have made reading errors we made me calculation errors but can we all agree that if it turns out the way that it turns out that it is what it is and we are listening to you we're not we're not trying to shut you down we're trying to listen and to get our work done while also kind of balancing the needs of the community i think  i think for the most part we've been really receptive to the to the feedback that we've received we've met a stupid amount of times we've seen each other far more than i think we really wanted to and we've trying to work through this without just sort of saying look we're not we're not listening to bruce we can hang out any time you want so we but as far as these bills that just came out so we excel do the work so you should check the formulas before we send it out to say yeah i haven't been through this kind of thing yet but but then we know it's not about the bills it's it's not about sorry it's not about the bills well i mean i'm sorry can i can we just time out for for a second so we're going to be discussing the preliminary engineering report on the tank and then i think