By BRADY BURKE

I went to the BPU meeting. There were about 15 people there and I was the only one that stood up to speak out against the increase on the sewer rate increase. I would have spoken out against the potable water increase, but they had a 45 page powerpoint presentation on power sources by some outside consultant where I could not understand her accent. That presentation was going to take hours and the Potable water issue was somewhere after that. My condolences to the BPU for having to stay.

My first comment to the folks that don’t go to these meetings is that you have no one to blame for these uncontrolled increases if you only voice your concerns a week after the decisions are made. If you wait until it gets to the County Council, you have a much greater battle, because they are taking the advice of the Advisory Boards and ‘Stakeholders’ (Stakeholders = Private Interest Groups appointed by the County).

If you want to show the County that we, the property owners and residents of Los Alamos County, are the Stakeholders, then we have to appear in large numbers and object.

If you had been to the BPU meeting you would have been impressed by all those involved in the back and forth over the sewer issue, especially, Jeff Johnson (Chair) and Stephen McLin (Vice Chair) of the Board of Public Utilities. Even the Utilities representative said that there were other options to managing the rate increases. If you don’t have the meeting information, you can’t be effective at the County Council gripe level.

Here’s the rough dialog of how the presentation went (My apologes to the County Rep, for not having his name) :

County Utility guy: We’d like an 8 percent increase on the base charge for sewer service to Los Alamos County Residents. Here are our numbers.

Public Comment (Brady Burke): Why do you need an 8 percent increase, what about all these things and the money that you’ve already collected?

BPU to County Utility guy: Yeah, what about those things? And what about these other things? These increases cost us as well.

County Utility guy: That information is correct and those are valid concerns. Here is what has happened, why we need the increase and options by which we can better manage the money.

BPU: Rate increase approved.

If you were there, and you heard it all, like me and the BPU, you would be in agreement that the increase is warranted for now, but it needs to be managed differently and should have an end date when the justification runs out.

We are not usually given the ‘Send it Back for Revision’ option once it hits the County Council, unless you have half the County in that Room arguing against it. You have a better chance of getting it revisited if a quarter of the County shows up at the BPU meeting. One voice against the perceived needs of the County is not going to do it.

In the 30-45 minutes while I was sitting there hearing the presentation for the rate increase and reading the supplied documents, the following questions came to mind and were voiced during the Public Comment section:

• Have the Residential use versus Commercial use costs of sewer service been identified. All your numbers are for Residential. Where are the Commercial user numbers?

• Regarding Attachment A1, Rate increases for sewer services have averaged 10% per year for the past five years. If your prior justifications have been accurate, what have you done with that money?

• Regarding Attachments D1 through D3, You are basing your increasing costs against median household incomes of about $100K and assuming that those incomes are rising 2.5 percent per year. How can you justify that average household income for those not employed by the Lab? How can you use a number like 2.5 percent annual income increases when many in town are on fixed incomes and the Lab does not have a history of 2.5 percent wage increases. Where did you get your numbers to back up these assumptions?

• The 8 percent cost increase to the sewer base fee is an absolute, whether the median household income increases 2.5 percent or not. Perhaps it should be tied to the actual income increases.

• The percentage increase to non-LANL employee household incomes is higher. You’re intermixing percentages and dollars as justification for the increases, selecting whichever makes you numbers look better.

• Regarding Attachment E, our rates are being compared to counties with a sliding scale based on consumption, yet Los Alamos has adopted a flat fee per gallon. A sliding usage rate makes sense. Higher users utilize the system more than small users. Higher users have a greater opportunity to adopt economizing behaviors to reduce costs. With a flat fee, no matter how much the smaller users economize, they cannot reduce their cost, so there is no incentive to conserve.

• As replenishment of the cash reserves are required for the mandatory maintenance on the White Rock Water Treatment facility, are the funds being set aside for that purpose, or being made available for other projects, emergencies, etc? If targeted, then they can have an endpoint when a goal is reached. If used for all other funding, then no one know when it can go away and we continue to suffer annual project and maintenance cost increases without accountability.

Then the BPU had questions that I would have asked, if I had more than three minutes, and thought of them.

Thank you to the BPU for asking the pointed questions and to the County Utility guy for being up front with the answers.

For the rest of us, Be Involved and demand accountability and transparency from our government representatives.