MONTAGUE – Sewer customers will see their bill increase by 71 percent this year.
The Selectboard has unanimously approved the substantial hike in sewer rates for Fiscal Year 2019. The rates are applicable to all metered, non-metered, industrial and minimum-rate users. Other rates will not be affected.
Metered customers in all five villages will pay $14.15 per 1,000 gallons they use — last year, they paid $8.28 — a $6.23 increase.
Customers who are not metered and are charged a 12-month flat rate paid $458 in 2018. They’re bills will rise to approximately $782 this year, a $324 increase.
Industrial and Gill customers who paid $7.66 per 1,000 gallons last year will pay $13.09, a $5.43 increase.
The minimum bill amount was also changed from $36 to $62, a $26 increase.
The Selectboard held a sewer rate hearing recently, where some residents expressed dismay over the increases. The state estimates that a typical household uses about 100 to 120 gallons of water per day.
Arlene Jigarjian of Montague said she has concerns about the new rates’ effect on senior citizens and low-income residents.
“This is going to devastate some of our senior citizens, particularly those who are on Social Security, which barely goes up at all and a lot of lower-income residents,” Jigarjian said. “This is a significant increase for folks who have not planned it. It’s just all of a sudden a huge amount.”
Losing the Montague process sludge disposal program, along with the closing of Southworth, was a contributing factor — two major sources of revenue for the town — creating a “perfect storm,” according to officials.
Town Manager Steve Ellis said both were major reasons for the need to increase rates.
It was discovered 10 months ago that the pilot’s test was being discontinued and the town wouldn’t be able to continue using the Montague process. But because the process involved large amounts of solid waste, any heavy rainstorms or other extreme weather events posed risks for overflows into the Connecticut River. So after the town tried to replicate the model of the state-run program in 2017, the Department of Environmental Protection deemed it too unstable, too much of an environmental risk, and ordered the town to end it — which left the town with significant decreases in revenue and increases in expenses.
Originally, from 2010 to 2016, the Montague process had been run through a state pilot program. It was a system in which sludge was consumed by the bacteria within it. At its peak in 2016, the program reduced Montague’s sludge disposal costs to $19,010 and brought $483,054 in revenue from other towns use of the program.
On top of that, the Southworth factory left an unpaid sewer bill of $250,000 when it closed in 2017; and a prospective sale of the company to another manufacturer, which would have restored the factory as a source of revenue for the town, fell through in February 2018.
“As difficult as this is for all of us and our neighbors, it’s a reality that we’re unable to run that process right now, and it does flip our economics in a very, very dramatic way, and we all regret that greatly,” Ellis said.
The rate hike is the result of an increased budget for the Water Pollution Control Facility that was approved at a Special Town Meeting earlier this month. The facility’s budget for the 2019 fiscal year was revised to $2,396,379 from $2,017,231 that had originally been approved for this year at the Annual Town Meeting in May. Whereas the original budget had resulted in an increase of about 38 percent over last year’s rates, this revised budget pushed rates up to a total increase of 71 percent.
The budget for the Water Pollution Control Facility that was approved in May tried to address these changes by reducing the Water Pollution Control Facility’s staff from seven employees to five, which would have reduced costs for wages by 26 percent. But after the May vote, the Department of Environmental Protection rejected that planned reduction, and instead required the facility to increase its staff to 8.6 full-time employees — another increased cost for the facility.
All this comes during a multi-year trend of decreasing industrial revenue for the Water Pollution Control Facility, McDonald said. Since 2012, industrial revenue has gone from about $644,000 a year to about $206,000.
Hence, the increased budget, which passed nearly unanimously at the Special Town Meeting.
Over the coming years, Water Pollution Control Facility Superintendent Robert J. McDonald said the facility will try to generate revenue through other sources. The town has a grant from the state to build a solar panel array at the facility, which is expected to begin construction in the spring and be operational in the summer. The town is also coordinating a new sludge disposal program with Greenfield, which could be operational in two to three years.