About two and a half hours into a meeting of the Ansonia Water Pollution Control Authority Wednesday (Feb. 19), Sewer Administrator Rita St. Jacques told WPCA Chairman Nunzio Parente she had neglected to include one item in her monthly report to the board.
She joked that she needed to schedule a hairdressing appointment Friday — “Because you’re going to make me gray.”
At that point the meeting was barely halfway over.
The WPCA has been playing catch-up the past couple of months, with marathon meetings lasting well over four hours each as new members familiarize themselves with how the city manages its sewer system — along with a host of other issues.
Background
The WPCA has been in a state of transition for months.
Before the board was reconstituted last month with four new members, its last meeting had been last September.
That meeting came after most of the WPCA’s prior membership resigned in July.
Aldermen appointed new members, who met twice but then couldn’t muster a quorum for their October meeting.
During an Aldermen’s meeting that month, Fifth Ward Alderwoman Joan Radin asked then-Mayor James Della Volpe what was going on with the WPCA.
She noted the WPCA’s sporadic meeting record and also complained that people with late sewer fees had to make payments through a lawyer’s office instead of directly to the city.
Della Volpe said he was struggling to find volunteers to serve on the board.
“There were some problems with the previous board, and they resigned, and I’m trying to fill the positions as we go along,” he said.
The WPCA did not meet at all in either November or December, but after Cassetti defeated Della Volpe in November’s election, the new mayor appointed five new members to the authority:
- Michael D’Alessio, Democrat
- Charles Stowe, Republican and Board of Aldermen member
- Andrew Geruntho, unaffiliated
- Nunzio Parente, Democrat
- Kenneth Plavnicky, Republican
The new members joined holdover members Carmine Durante and Anthony LiMauro.
Parente was elected chairman of the WPCA unanimously at the authority’s organizational meeting Jan. 8.
Click here to read WPCA meeting minutes from the city’s website.
New Commission, New Chairman
Parente said he ran Mayor David Cassetti’s company, BIRM-I Construction, for 30 years.
After Cassetti was elected, he asked Parente, who previously served on the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission for about 20 years, to help revive the WPCA.
Since taking charge, the new board, with Parente at the helm, has made it clear they’re changing the way the WPCA operates.
For one, they say they’ll show up to meetings every month.
And, based on the evidence of their first two meetings, they’re going to scrutinize very carefully how the authority spends its money.
At last month’s meeting, they spent hours going over the WPCA’s budget line item by line item with Rich Bshara, the city’s assistant comptroller, according to meeting minutes.
Article continues after last month’s minutes. Scroll to page 7 to read the budget discussion.
And on Wednesday the WPCA transferred about $375,000 from a slew of different line items into the authority’s contingency fund.
Parente said the aim was to get a better handle on the authority’s finances by making WPCA employees come before the board to rationalize proposed spending.
Though Parente says he barely graduated high school, his use of the Socratic method and his eye for detail would make a law professor proud.
Example: When St. Jacques and WPCA Superintendent Brian Capozzi raised concerns about not being able to access funding for items like paying a company to haul off sewer sludge, or overtime to WPCA workers.
“You’re making it a little more difficult for us to operate things,” St. Jacques said.
“That’s the objective,” Parente said.
The new chairman said the employees have to justify their requests.
Parente likewise didn’t pull punches with Jay Jayanthan and Joseph Maffeo, two representatives of Prime AE, an engineering firm the WPCA uses as consultants.
He quizzed them on the monthly bill they had submitted to the authority, going through the document line-by-line asking for additional details for nearly a half-hour.
“You can sit down, Jay,” he told Jayanthan, who had stood to introduce himself to the board. “Take your scarf off because it might get a little hot.”
The subsequent conversation ranged from what work had gone into preparing a sewer map for the DPW to how the WPCA charges applicants to have the engineers review plans for sewer hook-ups to review work for a long-discussed state plan to improve a Route 8 exit ramp.
“Why are we paying to review the on-ramp?” Parente asked.
Because the city has nearby sewer lines and engineers must review the plans to make sure they’ll be OK during construction, Maffeo explained. The state will pay the WPCA back for the work, he added.
“My concern is the state decided they’re going to put either an entrance or an exit ramp there and it’s going to cost me money, me, to find out if that’s OK,” Parente said. “I would think that the state should pay all the money, not reimburse, pay, to find out if their ramp is OK … I just think it’s ridiculous.”
The long-discussed possibility of an “interconnect” project to combine Derby’s and Ansonia’s sewage treatment operations also came up during the conversation.
After the discussion, an audio clip of which is posted below, the WPCA unanimously approved paying the firm’s bill — and also approved several expenditures requested by Capozzi, like a new power washer and a spare pump.
The WPCA meets monthly at the treatment plant at the end of North Division Street on the first Wednesday of every month at 7 p.m.
