Tom Harbinson opened up the sewer bill from Derby’s Water Pollution Control Authority for his Roosevelt Drive business Monday and was shocked.
The bill for his company, IDA International Inc., jumped 56.5 percent from last year, from $935 to $1,463.
In the same period the WPCA’s budget went up from $2,256,739 to $3,227,921, or 43 percent, Harbinson pointed out.
“That’s kind of a shocking jump,” Harbinson said.
Harbinson posted a note about the increase on the Valley Indy’s Facebook page.
While the bill isn’t a major expense for his business, the increase caught his attention.
“It’s just concerning that costs would go up so dramatically,” he said.
Harbinson wasn’t the only one concerned.
Many Derby residents received their new sewer bills last Friday and Saturday.
Several residents contacted the Valley Indy via e‑mail or Facebook asking why their sewer bills went up.
Meeting minutes indicate the average residential sewer bill increased by $100.
The Valley Indy attempted all week to contact members of the city’s Water Pollution Control Authority, the group that put the tax hike into effect. Several members wouldn’t comment or return phone calls, but WPCA Chairman Leo DiSorbo gave an interview to the CT Post, which can be read here.
While the increase wasn’t done in secret — the WPCA advertised and held public hearings on their plans and discussed it at length during many public meetings — residents are wondering why the group didn’t at least put a note explaining the increase in the envelope with the new bills.
It’s not exactly standing-room only at meetings of the WPCA. The authority members set their yearly budget at the same time the city and school district officials hammer out their high-profile spending plans.
So this year’s sewer increase came as a surprise to many Derby residents.
“We’ve had lots of calls, lots of complaints,” Marcy McGuire, a Water Pollution Control Authority administrator at City Hall, said Monday afternoon. “They want an explanation of how their bills have gone up.”
The explanation, according to city officials — the WPCA had to take on some large projects that had been put on the back burner in cash-strapped Derby for far too long.
McGuire handed out a piece of paper with a three-paragraph description of some capital projects the WPCA is undertaking in the next year.
But the document, posted below, lacks important information, such as what the projects cost.
The capital projects include: improvements to the Roosevelt Drive Wastewater Pumping Station, sewer improvements between Route 8 and Cemetery Lane, and a new pumping station on the city’s east side.
Article continues after the document.
Mayor Anthony Staffieri also said he’s been hearing complaints from residents.
He said the jump in most people’s bills is due to the infrastructure improvements, which he said “address the issues that need to be addressed” and would have only grown more expensive with time.
It was now or never, the mayor said.
“Band-Aids have been put on just temporarily fixing everything,” the mayor said. “Unfortunately, Band-Aids after awhile keep getting bigger and bigger.”
Staffieri said he’s been telling those who have complaints that they should bring their concerns — and their sewer bills — to the next WPCA meeting, scheduled for July 16 at 7 p.m. in City Hall.
The sewer bills arrived at the same time as car tax bills and a property tax jump. Some Derby residents, particularly on Derby’s east side, are seeing major property tax hikes due to revaluation.
“It just happens to fall on a bad time,” Staffieri said of the timing of the new work coming at a time when the economy is in the doldrums.
The mayor referred more specific questions to DiSorbo and WPCA member John Saccu.
Meeting minutes from the WPCA are available online.
The minutes are hard to follow unless you’re a member of the WPCA, but they seem to indicate members of the authority have been contemplating the improvements described since March, when an engineer told them the city could save millions by doing some of the work at the same time the state is making improvements to Route 34.
Click here to read the minutes of that meeting.
Then, at an April 12 meeting of the authority, “discussion was on the possible increase of fees by 40% to cover future capital projects,” according to the minutes of the meeting.
Minutes from the WPCA’s May 3 meeting attribute $835,000 of the $971,182 WPCA budget increase to a bond payment that “will pay for the design of the pump station, the Route 34 project, Hawthorne Ave sewer replacement and for a new vactor truck.”
“The residential user will see an increase of approximately $100.00,” the May 3 meeting minutes go on to say. “Commercial will see an increase from $3.36 per average daily gallons to $6.00.”
The $3.23 million budget for 2012 – 2013 was then adopted at the authority’s May 22 meeting without discussion, according to the meeting minutes.
Click here to read all the available WPCA meeting minutes online.
