A Derby committee met at 7 a.m. Sunday to review the qualifications of engineering firms the city is being forced to hire because of an order from the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP).
The meeting’s unusual time and lack of advance notice has raised concerns among both Democrats and Republicans in Derby.
And it’s adding another barb to the thicket of issues surrounding the Derby Water Pollution Control Authority and efforts to fix the city’s sewer system.
“(The meeting) certainly seems unethical,” said JR Romano, a Derby native now serving as the state Republican Party chairman. “What were they doing? What did they discuss? What if they got together to push one vendor over another? We have no idea.”
The meeting was attended by Mayor Anita Dugatto, tax board Chairman Jim Butler, Aldermanic President Art Gerckens and two Derby City Hall staffers — Henry Domurad, who works in the mayor’s office, and Sal Coppola, the city’s finance director.
The group opened and reviewed the qualifications of three engineering firms who are bidding to do work for Derby. The price quotes themselves were not opened and no formal action was taken, according to Dugatto and Gerckens.
The three companies are Weston & Sampson (the WPCA’s current engineering firm), Prime Engineering (the city’s current engineering firm), and Wright Pierce, according to the mayor.
The city has until the end of December to hire an engineering firm, thanks to an administrative order from state environmental regulators.
Dugatto said the Sunday meeting was simply an attempt to catch up on work and make progress on the order.
“We’re trying to follow the order, and trying to get business done, and just trying to work it through,” Dugatto said.
“We opened up these RFQs (requests for quotes qualifications),” Gerckens said. “We looked at the people, we looked at their qualifications, their education, their similar projects. For my own record I took note of the time we started, who was there and the time it ended.”
Open Meeting?
Thomas Hennick, a spokesman with the state’s Freedom of Information Commission, said the Sunday meeting could be in violation of the state’s Freedom of Information Act.
The mayor has the right to meet with staffers and conduct city business without letting the public know her every move.
But the mayor specifically referred to Sunday’s gathering as a committee meeting in an email to the Valley Indy Nov. 23, and told the New Haven Register earlier this month that a committee was to review the engineering bids and “recommend a course of action.”
“The fact she’s calling it a group or committee of some kind, that is the trigger,” Hennick said.
The FOI Act mandates that the public must be given notice of meetings of committees of public agencies, including a time and place, at least 24 hours in advance.
The “committee” that met Sunday morning would have would been within its rights to open the meeting and then immediately go into a closed-door executive session to review the documents.
The Sunday meeting also doesn’t seem to jive with the Derby Charter, the set of rules elected officials are supposed to follow.
The charter calls for a city Finance Committee to be involved with bids.
Ammo For Critics
FOI questions aside, the Sunday 7 a.m. meeting gives fuel to Dugatto’s critics, who have complained she doesn’t follow procedures or communicate well with other officials.
Dugatto, a Democrat, was just elected to her second term as mayor.
Carolyn Duhaime, a Republican who previously served on the WPCA and the city’s tax board, has been critical of the mayor’s dealings with WPCA matters, pointing out the WPCA is supposed to be independent of the mayor.
No one from the WPCA was at Sunday’s meeting.
“That meeting … is a glaring example of the lack of communication from the mayor’s office on matters involving the WPCA,” Duhaime said.
Sam Pollastro, a Republican member of the Derby tax board, said the Dugatto administration has not delivered on its promise of transparency.
“That’s what I’m talking about. They’re just not being transparent. We’re all just being kept in the dark,” Pollastro said. “The taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent.”
“It just doesn’t pass the smell test,” Romano, the state GOP leader, said of the Sunday morning meeting. “It goes back to her complete lack of understanding of the role of the mayor. She can’t just do whatever she wants.”
But Gerckens, the president of the Derby Board of Aldermen, said the Sunday meeting wasn’t designed to keep the public in the dark.
Gerckens said the mayor said the meeting was needed immediately because of the looming deadline with state environmental regulators.
“I don’t think there was any malice in it,” Gerckens said.
Dugatto said if a mistake was made, the next meeting will be noticed.
She said the intent was to work on the weekend to deal with a complicated issue — a state environmental order.
“Not everyone is going to be happy with everything I do,” Dugatto said. “It’s just the way it is. It’s where I am today. But I’m not afraid to continue on, doing what I need to do to make the best decision and to try to move this along.”
Gerckens said at least three members of his own party on the Board of Aldermen expressed their displeasure at the meeting’s lack of advanced notice.
“This WPCA issue is just a nightmare to deal with,” Gerckens said. “You could see why no one wanted to deal with this in the past.”
Carmen DiCenso, a Democrat on the Board of Aldermen, said “there was some concern of procedure” regarding the Sunday meeting.
He referred additional questions to Thomas Welch, the city’s lawyer. The Valley Indy left a message for Welch Wednesday afternoon.
Background Information
The WPCA, by the way, refers both to the employees who work in Derby’s sewer department, and to the separate citizen advisory board that provides oversight to those employees.
Last year voters approved borrowing more than $30 million to repair and upgrade the city’s sewer system.
Improvements are on tap for pump stations, sewer pipes and for Derby’s sewage treatment plant off Caroline Street under the Route 8 bridge.
Those repairs are expected to make the average residential sewer bill increase by almost $300 next year (between $256 and $275, to be exact).
But in August, DEEP Commissioner Robert Klee issued an administrative order alleging Derby WPCA employees working at the sewage treatment plant were not properly trained.
The environmental agency cited a past inspection where a Derby worker allegedly changed the numbers on fecal coliform reports filed with the state.
In addition, DEEP alleged work had been done on the treatment plant without authorization from the state.
To add insult to injury, DEEP described the Derby wastewater treatment facility as “poorly operated and in overall disrepair,” and a potential threat to the environment.
The order is posted below and the article continues after the document.
DEEP Order To Derby by ValleyIndyDotOrg
DEEP, apparently fed up with the WPCA, then ordered Derby to hire an engineering firm by the end of December to address the issues at the treatment plant and to study whether to :
- Modernize the facility, or
- Abandon it and pump sewage elsewhere (Ansonia, most likely).
Why does any of this matter?
Well, with single-family houses already slated to pay as much as $300 next year, Derby officials are worried the DEEP order will end up costing ratepayers even more money.
The WPCA responded point-by-point, and asked DEEP to reconsider the order.
The WPCA’s response is posted below. Read it, then read the rest of the article.
City of Derby WPCA Response 2015 by ValleyIndyDotOrg
Issues, Issues, Issues
The Sunday meeting is also peculiar because the Aldermen had just held a closed-door “executive session“ meeting Thursday (Nov. 19) to discuss hiring a law firm to help them deal with DEEP’s environmental order.
The closed-door session followed proper procedures and was allowed since the Aldermen were discussing a contract.
No one mentioned the bids would be discussed at a meeting Sunday.
The Aldermen eventually voted unanimously in public to hire Pullman & Comley, a firm based in Hartford, to help with their DEEP troubles.
The firm charges anywhere from $140 to $415 an hour, depending on the work and personnel involved.
The law firm had already been helping Derby with the matter prior to the Aldermen’s formal approval Nov. 19.
But there was resistance to hire the firm at a tax board meeting Nov. 16.
Two Republicans on the tax board — Pollastro and Chris Carloni — voted against moving $40,000 within the Derby budget to go toward legal fees connected to the DEEP order.
Further complicating the matter — Carloni works for the Derby WPCA (as does Alderman Stephen Iacuone).
Carloni voted against the measure because he said Derby WPCA employee Lindsay King is best suited to handle the DEEP problems.
Dugatto said the city needs a lawyer who specializes in environmental orders.
After the meeting, Pollastro said he has problems with the way Dugatto is handling the issue.
“It’s just not transparent,” Pollastro told the Valley Indy.
If the WPCA drama couldn’t get more complicated, Dugatto also faces tension from Weston & Sampson, the engineers working for the Derby WPCA.
There is a concern in Derby that Dugatto wants to connect Derby sewage to the sewage treatment plant in Ansonia, or that she wants to push Weston & Sampson off the pay roll.
Dugatto said the whispers just aren’t true. She’s made no decision regarding the connection to Ansonia, but supports looking into the matter.
“To say what my direction is going to be in the end is unfair. This is a process, but unfortunately we’re all not working together on this process, obviously,” she said.
Engineers from Weston & Sampson authored a report in April 2014 that concluded regionalizing sewer services in Derby and Ansonia didn’t make sense.
Derby has the ability to accept sewage “flow” from Orange and Seymour, the report concluded.
Click here to read the Weston & Sampson report.
The August order from DEEP seems to brush aside the 2014 Weston & Sampson report.
Further muddying the WPCA waters — DEEP rejected Weston & Sampson’s all-important “facilities report“ prepared for the Derby WPCA, saying the facilities report didn’t do enough to address problems at the sewage treatment plant.
Click here for a previous story, and for audio from a WPCA meeting during which the matter was discussed at length.
In a letter from May 2014, a DEEP supervising engineer urges Derby to continue exploring whether it makes sense to connect to Ansonia.
Dugatto said DEEP is now ordering Derby to take another shot at its “facilities plan.”
“We have one plan, so now we’re getting a second opinion, basically. If someone says you need brain surgery, you get a second opinion,” she said.
