Following increases to sewer rates in both of the town’s wastewater districts, Cumberland Town Manager Ben Lipps and town contractors have responded, explaining their reasoning for the project and corresponding rate hikes.
Lipps and engineering consultant Kameryn Wright from Butler, Fairman and Seufert Civil Engineering said that upgrades to the town’s sewer system were long overdue.
“There’s been issues, not just here, but everywhere, with different boards or politicians kicking the can down the road,” Lipps said.
The plants themselves are past their useful life, Wright said, and doing patchwork repairs until failure would have cost ratepayers more over the long term than doing the upgrades now, both due to the additional costs of the repairs themselves and due to the implementation of a federal regulation known as Build America, Buy America, passed as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, which requires U.S. public infrastructure projects to have a certain percentage of components and all manufacturing to be done in the U.S. if those projects receive federal funding. Since the project began before the implementation of BABA, it isn’t subject to those regulations, which could have increased project costs significantly. According to Municipal Advisor Adam Stone, another consultant on the project, though, the project would have been subject to BABA had it been delayed to the next cycle, which was why it was important that the town implement the rate increase before the start of the year to keep the project on track.
The plants typically have a 20-year life span, which the plants would be approaching anyway, but documentation suggests that the equipment at the northern plant was bought used, meaning that plant is most likely already past expiration, Wright said. He added that there are already “catastrophic failures” at the plant that would require extremely costly repairs.
A major point of contention with the rate increases was the continuance of the flat rates within the Gem utility area, but Stone said that the flat rate was kept to keep the project consistent with the initial rate study to keep things moving. Lipps and Stone both said that it was possible to convert the Gem area to a usage-based rate in the future if meters were installed prior to the next rate study, acknowledging that the flat rate increase is harder on those with fixed incomes.
Stone also noted that the rate hasn’t increased in 12 years, while inflation has increased by around 27% as of 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Had the rate been increasing at the rate of inflation, the rate would already be higher than that of the first year rate increase.
Lipps also said that the town is looking at credit programs to help offset the cost for residents who can’t afford the rate increase, but he acknowledged that the town needed to come up with something concrete to earn trust from those residents that relief is coming.
“You hear words, but you have no reason to trust me, and I appreciate that,” Lipps said. “I’ve told people that for 17 years now working in government. I know I could say a million things, but what about the actions? So these are all good thoughts and things that we are going to pursue, but I hope people see the actions to where they can trust [our words] in the future.”
