4.26.2022 Fall River City Council

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city council public hearings will now come to order madam clerk house is kadeem here tamara here dion here kilby here lee here pelletier here herrera here proposal yep and president liberty here pursuant to the open meeting law any person may make an audio or video recording of this public meeting or may transmit the meeting through any medium attendees are therefore advised that such recordings

or transmissions are being made whether perceived or unperceived by those present and are deemed acknowledged and permissible i have a motion to open the hearing motion to open second motion open the hearing made by counselor poses second up by counselor dion all those in favor aye aye opposed item one is auto auto repair shop naomi naomi soares 1030 dwelling street dba rs performance and

repair for a license to operate and auto repair shop at 10 30 dwelly street on lot g-15-344 on the assessor's plan are there any proponents that are wishing to speak any proponents did you want to speak if you would just give your name an address for the record naomi soares 1030 dwelling street i just wanted to introduce myself to the whole board my name is naomi i'm trying to open up a small little

repair shop and i honestly hope you all vote in favor of me to open this with the license thank you all for your time today thank you thank you years ago that was a repair shop it was before it's not different thank you thank you thank you thank you any other proponents sitting on any opponents that would like to speak any opponents second motion to close the hearing made by counselor kilby second invite council

vice president dion all those in favor aye so voted the second item was for a poll location and motion open motion open second motion to open the hearing made by council raposo second about council vice president dion all those in favor aye opposed not was mass electric company for a new local location as follows on essex street the petitioner is proposing the installation of a new 35-foot pole and anchor with

dying approximately 105 feet west of existing pole number nine the extension of a secondary conductor will allow for two new houses to be serviced are there any proponents that would like to speak can you give your name and address for the record please michael frazier national grid 245 south main street hopedale um proposing to install a new pole 10 on essex street approximately 105 feet

west of existing pole 9 for services to new houses okay anything further no thank you any other proponents that would like to speak all right good evening everyone my name is monica justino this is my husband jason justino uh we live at 10 tiffany drive and we're here in regards to ongoing flooding issues here for citizen input are you here for citizen simple or for the we're in the public hearing oh

i'm so sorry no that's okay any other proponents for the poll location any opponents second motion to close maybe my counselor he'll be seconded by councillor pereira all those in favor hi motion to adjourn the second second motion of journey made by council vice president dion seconded by council pereira all those in favor aye it's a voted meeting with detroit

fall river city council committee on finance will now come to order madam clerk house is kadeem here camara here dion here kilby here lee here fellaini yeah pereira here proposal yeah president la liberty labeau here person went to the open meeting law any person may make an audio or video recording of this public meeting or may transmit the meeting through any medium attendees are

therefore advised that such recordings or transmissions are being made whether perceived or unperceived by those present and are deemed acknowledged and permissible item one is citizen's input first person signed up to speak is jim pimentel somerset the subject is fair share amendment motion away for the rules emotional wave of the rules made by council for pearl second in my council

pilot here all those in favor aye aye any opposed mr bentley come down the microphone

good to see you all thank you mr president it's been quite a while since i've seen many of you hold on one minute yes could we have them come down to two people we can you want them to come to the table yeah certainly looks like he's got a package there anyway what's up to deliver good jump over no come this way you can just unhook it i know rebecca could jump jim i'm not sure

thank you so they have both signed up to speak the second speaker is rebecca cusick 1528 highland avenue the subject is fair share it's been a while since i've been here so not quite used to the procedures thank you so good evening we'd like to speak to you about the fair share amendment and the resolution in support of it that you'll be voting on tonight by the way i think if fall river

approves it it'll be either the 8th or 10th city council in the state in the last month or so to approve a resolution in support of it new bedford just did a couple of weeks ago the fair share amendment is an amendment to the massachusetts constitution that will appear in the form of a ballot question on november eighth that would change our state income tax from a flat five percent tax on all

personal income to one in which everyone would still pay five percent on the first million and then pay an additional four percent on any personal income earned over one million dollars so in other words you make a million and one hundred dollars you pay five percent on the first million you pay nine percent on the 100 bucks over in any other income i want to underscore what i just said

the additional four percent would apply only to personal income earned not assets not business income nothing else the additional revenue raised which is estimated to be approximately one and a half billion dollars annually could only be spent by the legislature on infrastructure public transportation and public education both k-12 and higher ed consider what the extra annual income would mean for far of his

aging infrastructure and its public education system i don't have the stats specifically for fall river but according to the american society for civil engineers 470 bridges and one out of every four roads are in poor condition in the state repairing the bridges alone will cost 15 billion dollars and the impact from driving on these substandard roads cost the average driver an extra 620 per year

the additional funding could also help provide expanded bus service for serta while we're waiting for south coast rail and would it help ensure the rail network has the resources it needs to maintain efficient enzyme service once up and running besides the needed investments to our state's economy that the change would provide provide it also makes the state income tax a little bit fairer

for years the highest income households in massachusetts have paid a smaller share in state and local taxes than any other income group they've also repeatedly benefited from federal tax cuts the handful of billionaires in massachusetts saw their wealth increase by a total of 17.2 billion dollars during the first seven months of the pandemic alone our legislature has already overwhelmingly passed this twice at two

constitutional conventions in 2019 and 21 with the last one the last vote coming in at 159 to 41.

by the way according to the most recent data i've seen fall river has only eight individuals that would be affected by this amendment and now i'd like to ask my friend and school teacher to correct any mistakes that i've made and talk to you about how this could positively affect our public education system so good evening it's been a while since i've been before you it's nice to see you this evening

so in 2015 i was one of the 10 original signers on the citizens petition to bring the fair share amendment before the voters of massachusetts i signed signed on because as an educator and as a parent i knew that we needed to address the long-standing funding inequities that exist among communities i believe then and i still do today that it was my responsibility to advocate for our kids

to have a level playing field and i certainly know that our families in this city could benefit from increased funding for pre-k as well as higher education since that time as you know the state passed the historic student opportunity act legislation which updated the old school funding law the new law includes a plan to fund k-12 education over seven years however it did not specify a source of revenue from

which to pay for it the fair share amendment would go a long way in helping to fulfill the promise of the student opportunity act the original fair share petition garnered over 000 signatures from massachusetts voters and it passed two constitutional conventions with overwhelming support and there is strong public approval approval for fair share as independent polling has found that 72 percent of

massachusetts voters support the passage fair share is a way to make long-term sustainable investments and to contribute to our state's economic growth while over 99 percent of us won't pay a penny more we will all benefit from improvements in infrastructure transportation and public education thank you for listening to us tonight and i hope you will um sign on to the group in favor of this amendment

thank you counselor c3 council vice president dion good evening thank you for coming this evening i just want to ask a couple questions for clarification purposes um obviously i don't know anybody who would disagree with moving forward with this my questions are um so the allocation to different municipalities would have a criteria i imagine as to how much each municip which each municipality would get within

the state that would be my first question so i believe the money would go to the state and then they would be required by if this law passes to dedicate it to only those expenses that are related to transportation and education i don't think there is um a formula spelled out for what money goes what percentage of money goes where that's my understanding i think it's yeah i think it's going to be basically on like a

a needs assessment would be done you know by the legislators so different municipalities and communities would submit proposals for a certain level of funding and then the legislature would have to weigh the needs of each community is my understanding i don't know what the exact mathematical formula is now do you know if that would be they would uh request a lump sum for all categories or if a municipality would

specifically ask for certain dollar amounts for each category i think that has to be determined by the legislators if this is if this passes okay all right thank you with that i yield thank you counselor anything further from the council thank you thank you thank you thank you next person signed up to speak it's jason justino 10 tiffany drive and the subject is sewage sorry about that earlier first time

coming here go down here yeah okay i like to see

good evening everyone my name is monica justino and this is my husband jason justino we live at 10 tiffany drive we are here in regards to ongoing flooding issue we've had since we purchased a home in july 2020. this home was newly built in 2017 and we're currently the second homeowners as you can imagine this was a big investment as a young couple and therefore had a lot of questions upon

purchasing the home we had asked our realtor ethan from keller williams and the seller's realtor nelly from piba real estate services if this home was in a so-called flood zone we were informed it was not and all information on any relative website in 2020 had shown the fema report for this particular address to be one out of 10 flood factors since we are not near any bodies of water swamps or anything in that nature

fast forward to finding out that our first rainstorm would be encountering flooding issues especially when it rains heavily we are extremely concerned since flooding due to repeat exposure flooding situations can cause incredible damage to a home's foundation especially with repeat exposure and cuts off access to emergency services if needed transportation since we can't even leave

our homes and it's super unsanitary when people's cities trash sewer waters floating around and that water entering into our finished basement we have personally gone to city hall in person and spoken with paul ferlin from the wanted student department he was nice enough to take time out of his day to speak to us on the same day without a scheduled appointment mr ferlin mentioned he would have someone go out

to the property check surrounding catch basins a few weeks later someone by the name of mark went out to the house and mentioned to me that he was going to have some of his guys go into the catch basins and look in with a camera he did but we never heard anything back from anyone and we went to city hall again they basically told us there was nothing wrong they said they didn't find anything in

the catch basins but there's clearly something very wrong as you will see in these pictures at this time the water levels at the time the water levels are so high that we have to keep moving our vehicles further into the cul-de-sac to prevent any damage or to keep waking up in the middle of the night to remove water from the garage to prevent the watering water to coming into our home

any further or not being able to use toilets due to them gurgling and filling up to the rim to the point that now every time it rains we have a hard time sleeping because we're constantly worried about what damage will going to occur this time how much it's going to cost or if we have to lose another day from work without no pay just this past september we had damage to our newly vinyl fencing that we

installed in november a whole panel had to be replaced and the claim was submitted to the city not including all the damage that we had to our front landscape this is not a way to live especially when we have to pay so much for the home including taxes and we seem to be paying more taxes than our neighbors due to being the corn a lot but yet we're the only ones in the

cul-de-sac that have to deal with these issues every time it rains we just don't understand that if this street was in a so-called flood zone and was an ongoing issue for years why were these new homes signed off to be built on the street in the first place with the city knowing of the flooding issues in the area or better yet not disclose this information up front which should be one of the happiest

times of our lives has been filled with stress dried overwhelming constant concern in regards to this matter ten seconds we all ask you from the bottom of our hearts if you could help us find a resolution to this ongoing issue thank you all for your time thank you thank you yes well i recognize counselor in c5 i just want to point out that they have sent multiple emails with photos of all

of the flooding at their home on tiffany drive thank you councilman c5 council lee just a just a question um are there other people in your neighborhood having the same flooding problems or is it only your property um it actually builds up like right in front of the house and um it's actually hard to even leave the house it's like literally two to three feet but yes there we go we've spoken to

neighbors and they said that yes that they this has been an ongoing issue and they signed petitions in the past and nothing has moved forward with and just asking uh to the council president would the appropriate um subcommittee if there were a resolution to try to address this further would that be uh public works just yes okay just maybe not just making that question out there ah thank you for

your time and no thank you all for your time we appreciate it thank you next person signed up to speak is nelson valfoz 210 sunset hill and the subject is arpa funds

hello so uh i'm here today to speak on an issue that i believe is appropriate given the fact that the city is about to be receiving a second payment of the arbor funds and given the fact that city council has appropriation authority i think it's only appropriate that the city council ought to be in possession of that second payment because i just find it appalling that we have a private organization in control

of public funds i think the taxpayers are deserved to know to have more faith in this once in a lifetime opportunity to make sure that what's being planned is only open we got some details of what was going on but i just it doesn't sit right with me as a constituent that you know bce dc is in is is in possession of this a change needs to happen more faith needs to be put into this

into this possession of this money because it's a once in a lifetime thing for our city to to possess so i think it's only appropriate that the city council ought to have a say into what goes into into this money and lastly too in regards to durfee durfee's payment uh the number that the voters voted for to pay for durfee was 115 not too long ago channel 10 right before

the vote when it was finalized that was the number for seven years 115 dollars and i think would also be appropriate that this city council ought to demand the mayor to come down before the vote of of his budget to show the council to show the people of what the number he had on his desk that he failed to provide down here at the joint meeting because if it's more than 115 dollars

we all know what that what that entails he wants to dig in dig into the pockets and give more handouts to his friends and pay free more free cash into the budget which is not what the people voted for so i hope at some point this council demands to see that number and if you'll be happy i'll be happy to provide that uh article from channel 10 with that number to validate of what i just said

i just think it's appropriate that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for the school for the students to enjoy this school but if we're going to have transparency this may need to live up to that word and show the people the number he wanted to but i know the real number and i'll be glad to forward it to each and every one of you 115 is what the people voted for thank you

for your time thank you madam clerk anything submitted no madam president thank you next item item two is a discussion bro clark and associates basic financial statements for a year ending june 30th 2021

a representative from roselian clark members of the administration and if you would all please just give your name an address for the record

council president lebeau honorable members of the city council city minister aiken ladies and gentlemen my name is terenzio vopacelli i represent the firm of roselli clark and associates with offices in woburn massachusetts and hopedale massachusetts

shall i uh just go into the presentation yes um we were engaged to perform an audit of the city's 2021 financial statements this was the final year of a three-year engagement the city's 2021 audited financial statements were issued on february 3rd of 2022 our opinion was modified in the financial position and results of operation of the fall river redevelopment authority were not

incorporated as a discretely presented component unit outside of that a mission the financial statements are essentially clean required communications at the conclusion of an audit was provided to the city's mayor in a letter dated march 7th of 2022 i will just provide some of those highlights of our required communication management which includes the folks at this table and as well as as you all

are responsible for the selection and the use of appropriate accounting policies in 2021 the city adopted a new accounting standard related to fiduciary activities this accounting standard required a restatement of beginning balances of approximately 172 thousand dollars and this was consistent with virtually every one of our clients throughout the commonwealth very very typical accounting estimates are an integral

part of financial statements certain accounting estimates as well as their disclosures are more sensitive than others the most sensitive estimates and disclosures pertain to the determination of the total pension liability which is actuarially determined at the fall river uh retirement system as of december 31st of 2020 which is the latest available information that's included in the audited financial statements

the total pension liability was 715 million dollars and the pension system had a net position of 336 million dollars resulting in a net pension liability of 379 million dollars the actuary estimates that the pension system was 47 percent funded at december thirty first of twenty twenty the city's proportionate share of that net pension liability is approximately ninety one percent while housing is

seven diamond is two the determination of the total opeb liability would be the second significant accounting estimate that we would disclose the total op liability is about 669 million dollars as of june 30th of 2020 and the city has accumulated 767 thousand dollars to address that which is currently 0.11 percent funded it's important to note that in january of 2022 the cert the city made certain

changes to its retiree medical insurance that um it was expected to reduce the total op liability by approximately 100 million dollars at least that was the figure that was preliminary provided by the actuary we'll have a better idea what that real number is in a few months the third critical accounting policy and estimate pertains to management's estimate for the allowance for doubtful accounts

currently there's a fifteen point seven million dollar allowance on loans three million dollars on parking tickets two million dollars in excess excise tax receivables and a small amount related to property taxes personal property taxes the enterprise funds report a 683 000 allowance we did not encounter any significant difficulties in dealing with management and performing and completing a financial statement audit

and we're pleased to report that we had no significant disagreements with management in its accounting financial reporting and auditing matters thus concludes the required communications section of this presentation the city's general fund as reported in the audited financial statements that i believe each of you have it varies slightly from your internal accounting in that for gaap purposes

your stabilization funds are included in the general fund your general fund in the audited financial statements reported an increase in f and fund balance of over 6.3 million dollars in 2021 and that's a positive uh difference versus 2020 in 2019 which saw a 3.3 million dollar increase of 3.5 million dollar increase so for the last three years you've had a nice steady rise in your general fund

balance which is quite positive the city received in june of 2021 nearly 35 million dollars in arbor funds for which it fully deferred those amounts and was separately reported in the audited financial statements as a new major fund the 2021 general fund budget reflected about a 4.5 percent increase from 2022 i'm sorry from 2020 and in terms of budgetary performance in fiscal year 2021 general fund revenues

were consistent with budget while expenditures were over five million dollars under budget that surplus was due primarily to a three million dollar surplus in school transportation additionally there were many departments that turned back funds due to cost containment and the use of cares and other state and federal funds were expended in their place roughly one-third of the annual property

tax levy is assessed to residential homes as the city has significant commercial and industrial property tax base entering into fiscal 2022 for which were roughly three-quarters of the way done the city had a number of financial reserves the general stabilization fund exceeded 9.2 million dollars which is 1.7 million dollars greater than the prior year certified free cash coming into the us 5.4 million in the

general fund 2.4 and sewer 739 000 in water and 557 000 an ems and as i previously indicated a couple years ago the city set up a an open trust for which it's accumulated roughly 767 000 as of june 30th of 2021.

the city reports significant long-term liabilities associated with its debt as well as personnel related obligations such as complicate uh compensated absences opeb and pensions in its governmental activities which is the full accrual side of the financial statements and that's the all of the city's operations excluding water sewer and ems these liabilities exceeded 1.1 billion dollars at june 30th of 2021.

the long-term debt bonded in mcwt loans and what not approached 358 million dollars for which 156 million dollars is related to the general uh general operations of the government and the remainder is being held by the enterprise funds in february of 2022 the city completed a general obligation bond payment and placement rather and moody's affirmed its credit score of a3 this signifies in moody's opinion that

the city has a strong capacity to meet its financial commission commitments but may be somewhat more susceptible to adverse effects of changes in economic conditions and circumstances than some of the more higher rated organizations as i mentioned earlier the net op liability for the governmental activities exceeded 653 million dollars at june 30th the entire city was 668 million dollars

the net pension liability for the city exceeded 321 million dollars in its governmental activities 346 million city-wide but right now the uh or as of december 30th the 30th of 2020 the actuary the independent actuary engaged by the retirement system estimates that this uh that the system is 47 percent funded as we previously mentioned the state and local recovery funds of opera the first installment was received in

june of 35 million dollars the city's total direct award allocation is expected to be approximately 70 million dollars an additional 16 million dollars is being directed managed and passed through by bristol county and those opera funds need to be obligated by december 31st 2024 and fully expended by 2026.

we understand that the city is currently working with a to contractor resource to assist in administering accounting and reporting for that arbor grant and at that point i relinquish to any questions comments or concerns thank you councilman seven council foreign yeah the question that i have i forgot i know you said tony i didn't catch the last terencio lorenzo thank you for being here the question i

have um is on the report that that we received um the basis for adverse opinion um and it it it's relative to talk about the redevelopment authority that you know there was no figures etc from them however the attorney for the redevelopment authority basically says that it's not a governmental union to require to have uh an audit this there was a law that came in that now they have to audit but they didn't before but

that my understanding was that they're a separate entity um and that they don't report to the city so tell me what you think as i understand the way it's organized the city has a modicum of control over that organization and under accounting standards it would have to be combined within the city's financial statements this is not a legal question this is more of an accounting presentation

matter well that's not what their attorney said because i contacted them when i saw this and wondered why they hadn't done an audit or years ago they didn't have to do an audit but now they do have to do an audit themselves but that it's a separate legal entity established as a public body um and corporation the redevelopment authority are separate legal entities and the city is

not responsible for any debt obligation or liabilities of the redevelopment authority so that confused me because if they're not then they're going to do their own thing and they have to submit their audits but it doesn't come into the audit that the city does i would have to speak with that attorney to actually see exactly what they're looking at because again this is an accounting standard not a

legal standard that we're referring to but i think they handle their own so i'm not i'm not sure about that but point of information if i may sure so if you look at a few years back there was a discussion about that and the rda was supposed to have annual audits they didn't do it for a time but they were supposed to and then the rda voted to have the city do the accounting for them

so i would just my opinion unless the rda as it stands now the board now um voted to separate themselves from the city and do their own accounting which i don't know if they did or didn't that's what they did so that's why they're saying that it shouldn't have been been brought up because when i saw it i called redevelopment but i would be interested your information may be that they're

still tied into the city doing the auditing and then that would be a whole that would that might be with with it where the uh glitch is that i rest but i would check it's attorney john coughlin and you can talk to sarah page i would check i'm sorry attorney john awesome let's see yeah i would just check that i had a question about that i know that they didn't have to even do an audit and

then they said they did have to do an audit so then they started doing it but the audits hadn't been done for a few years because it changed in 16 but they didn't do them so when when this redevelopment came on board and sarah page got in she had to go back and do the ones from previous years that weren't completed and then continue on to do it up to the present i talked to her

joe marshall and i talked to joan madeiras who are all members of that board and i got the same information from all of them because they weren't done they had to go back and do them but that they do it separately but you know it's good for you to check thank you did you find out let me know i always like to learn something i'll communicate through the management team okay oh that's fine that's fine yeah

you can let uh bridgette this is i don't know huh alma you can let ms sablin know and she'll i yield anything further from the council no thank you thank you thank you for having us

one point of clarification on the uh great development authority uh as early as today when we were looking at the uh 21 audit and of course most of us weren't around for the 21 fiscal 21 but we can read right and uh we plan on setting up a meeting with the redevelopment authority just to get some re-clarification of who's on first base oh great you know and we so that was

discussed today with the uh with bridget so that we can set something up to at least get an idea of where we're at what votes they might have taken to exclude or do they need to be excluded you know and as we approached for fiscal 22. i should have just called you ed yeah but i mean we will uh we'll get we'll get we'll get an answer on that and find

out exactly what they did or didn't do it you know when we'll we'll we'll address it i should have mentioned it to you and i apologize for not having reached out to you thank you thank you thank you item three is a discussion of proposed fy 23 budgets for water and sewer divisions

and ladies if you would just introduce yourselves to the council i don't we have not met the auditor yet yes and this is the first time that our new cfo is with us stacy well hi my name is ashley pyres new auditor hi how are you hopefully you'll be appointing her later on in a short time depends how this goes

and also the first time new cfo's here i think two besides your appointment so miss hellman correct excellent thank you counselors very much for having us here tonight um in front of you you have the fy 23 budget for community utilities which includes the water department and the sewer department if you'd like i'll do a brief overview of the of the budget so the sewer division budget proposed for fy 23 is 26 million

603 402 that would be supported by a rate of 5.75 uh that's a proposed increase of eight cents from the prior fiscal year of fy22 and a storm water rate of 47 per eru per quarter that is uh that is no increase from what the current stormwater rate is as you go through the budget you'll see all the different line items within the budget are laid out starting off with revenues then moves through sewer

indirect cost as well as uh stabilization uh within the fy 23 budget we have continued to uh include the hundred thousand dollar transfer to stabilization uh that this council has requested us to include uh two years ago um as you move down the program salaries uh then you go into water treatment expenses most of our expenses have stayed level funded except for some minor adjustments one increased water

in cso charge within the sewer department as most residents know over the past couple of years we've been replacing water meters throughout the city uh that includes all city buildings as well sewer plant being one of those so we had to adjust for the for an increase due to the new meters that were installed with more accurate readings the uh sewer treatment plan expenses again uh majority of those are are

even straight across we have increase in other professional services for uh increasing the contractual obligations for our o m contractor as well as there is an increase in the other purchase services which is primarily our sludge disposal and also the disposal of other other trash that's developed through the wastewater process there's also been an increase within the chemical line items from prior fiscal

years uh we when this budget was first built we but best estimated what our chemicals were going to come in at based on avenda's estimates uh vendors um vendors estimates when we went out to bid and his estimate seemed to be uh under what uh the actual bids came in at right now we're dealing uh all commodities um are dealing in a very volatile market that's something that uh you know we're

dealing with i'm sure a lot of other departments throughout the city are dealing with so chemicals is one thing that we are watching and looking for preparations for other improvements was level funded debt service was based off of the debt service anticipated to be charged within the fy 23.

one thing that i do want to note back in the revenue line item is the use of free cash or or revenue the as was uh proposed in a draft proposal to the uh council last year we did reduce the amount of uh retained earnings that we're using to support the fy 23 budget by 10 um from what was used last year our retained earnings did come in higher than that amount um higher than actually

what we used last year as well but i felt based on the policy and the proposal that was the draft proposal that was given to this council last year that it was best to reduce it by 10 of what was used within last year's budget so that's a brief uh rundown of the sewer budget for fy 23 within the water buddy wardrobe water division can we just take it sure

just so we're not jumping all over the place nope yes sir did you want to speak counseling i can counseling um mr frolin thank you and i appreciate the uh you know the reduction in the free cash i know that was really a sticking point and just establishing a policy for the retained earnings um went a long way can you just tell me and and i ask this every single year what what is the

how much do you generate in terms of revenue for a one-set increase in the sewer department one cent on the sewer is roughly about 26 000 and then in terms of your total budget i know we had looked at it because you know as we go through this obviously we don't want to see the rate payers pay more money but we'll get into water in a little bit but both sewer and water

you've got a lot of fixed costs associated with the running of the operation for water and sewer so trying to reduce the user rates is a little bit challenging because obviously you can't reduce the fixed cost so do you have a percentage in terms of the fy23 proposed budget what would be the fixed cost of the 26 million um that we're seeing uh i did not calculate that out exactly for

the uh fy23 typically in sewer runs us about 92 historically as fixed costs 92 roughly roughly

and then um and i apologize if i was looking at some photos on the flooding that we heard during the citizen input but if you if you stated this i apologize uh in terms of the salary so i'm not seeing significant increases in the salaries we is there still negotiations going on with the unions is that why we're and in some cases they're they're going down versus going up so the you know the sewer plant

has 480 000 for fy22 461 for fy23 yeah so the uh which particular line item is i'm sorry i was just programming i mean just just in in general just salaries but i was i was looking at the sewer plant in program salaries um just as an example so the fy 22 budget was 480 000 and the fy 23 budget is 461 000 so i'm just trying to figure out what the

decreases are is it new positions did we not include um cost of living adjustments that might have been agreed to in the collective bargaining agreement or do we have um is the collect i just don't know where we stand with the collective bargaining so is it expired no absolutely so that's still open there there hasn't been any increase this year that's in in negotiations right now the

collective bargaining agreement uh within the budget i have carried uh two and a half percent for um those um oh so you did you did build in yes a percentage increase whether that is what is uh negotiated or not uh is to be determined um the uh the other change that you see was um some changes from uh other personnel into uh into salaries and wages um back and forth there was a open position when

the fy 22 budget was buzz budgeted it was filled in the fy 23 which brought that down so those are the changes if you look at the bottom line item overall there is a slight increase in that if you look at the total sewer plant and program salaries um and then i guess one final question and then and then a statement uh the other personnel costs in the same category that i was just

talking about sewer plant program salaries can you just speak a little bit to what exactly that is it's going from 36 000 to 71 000.

is that where you capture the uh the differences yeah that's where you kept capture the increase uh there is a line item that i carry there for part-time part-time interns if we do get co-op students or other students available intern students available to be able to come in those are currently based in my budget those are carried within those line items okay nice i said i have one question and then

another statement i apologize uh the stable do we we have a stabilization account right so the stabilization account for sewer can you tell me what the balance is and i saw a hundred thousand going in for the water are we doing the same with sewer yeah so within the fy 22 budget both water and sewer uh does have a hundred thousand dollars that is budgeted from the operational budget to go into uh the stabilization

fund uh as was was discussed it seems not too long goes in front of you discussing the 22 budget but um we're going to be waiting till the end of the year to make that transfer to see how revenues fall due to the uh shortfall in the beginning of the year due to not having a rate increase currently what was in our accounts as of 1 4 22 so january 4th 2022

uh sewer had a stabilization account of 718 thousand three hundred and forty five dollars and that you said does not include a hundred thousand right that does not include the hundred thousand from the fy twenty two budget okay so and and then in terms it looks like we're looking at an eight cent increase for the uh the user rate yes correct so if we did want to reduce that we're talking about um

roughly 20 if we're looking at 92 percent of the 26 million dollars we're talking about 23 million dollars off the table right so uh we got three million dollars to play with to to kind of reduce areas and then outside of obviously salaries associated with um you know personnel costs that that's really where we're going is there if there were reductions outside of the fixed costs where would

you propose them to come from and obviously not having a number like where where would you stop is there anywhere you know i i can tell you there's nowhere that i would stop making any types of reductions within these budgets these budgets again are prepared uh january february time frame uh one issue that i'm running into right now is as i mentioned earlier my chemicals uh chemicals uh the budget was built with

the proposed increase this that were uh that were in there uh we went out to bid early this year hoping to capture um you know some savings earlier um that did not come to fruition currently uh the bids that we received were uh in sewer was about 200 000 over what is budgeted for chemicals um so already starting off um we're in a deficit in our chemicals i would not make any recommendations for

cuts within this budget so in terms of and i'm just trying to anticipate we we know how this goes every year right so uh i'm just trying to anticipate and head off some some of the questions and um so can can you speak in terms of your staffing levels where do you feel your staffing levels are are you at a comfortable benchmark are you below where you feel you need to be

um i know you probably won't tell me that you're above where you think you're going to be so you know i can tell you our staffing levels so at our wastewater treatment plant which is operated by violia a private contractor they provide all the labor and the o m for the waste water treatment plant we are staffed thin that is due to some open positions in wastewater there's the same type of

issue with getting the qualified licensed individuals to be able to operate the plant and the facilities you know right now the labor market i'm sure everybody has heard it and is experiencing the issues within the labor market and trying to hire labor to be able to perform work and competing with other places out there in the rates that other places are paying again right now we're in a uh

everything is in a volatile time whether it be uh commodities whether it be labor everybody is all over the chop which makes it very tough for us to be able to get people in or a vendor violia to be able to get people in office within my within my staff within my office so the employees that work for the city uh underneath the sewer department we are uh we've spread very thin

um you know there's a lot of different uh regulations that continue to come down the pike uh whether it be cso notification that we're gonna have to be dealing with in the near future on the water side we have uh lead issues that we have been dealing with and continue to deal with um the construction projects that we're continuing continuing to do you know my office my staff of five people within within my office

we manage both water and sewer budgets uh and over 70 million dollars of construction ongoing construction projects right now so it's not an easy feat for uh our staff right now um we are stretch very thin everybody uh everybody puts in a lot of time uh above and beyond what uh what's what's required of them so if that answers your question it does um i swear this is my final final question um

in terms of the the upper money appropriations how much has been set aside for today because we've been hearing some some items but how much has actually been set aside for the sewer department and then i'll ask the same question once we get to the water department because um you know i know we have the folks to come up before us assistant input you know we were talking about that area

last year and the year before that in terms of making sure that we try to identify um number one some improvements for the for the general area not just that neighborhood um and then trying to find some additional monies and then obviously we've got the opera monies that came down because i know there was significant cost associated with the the repairs right so i had originally asked

um and folks were trying to say when you looking at it from a return on investment or a cost benefit analysis i had asked just to see what the impact would be for all the homes surrounded i know it's only a couple neighborhoods specifically in the area but i think when you look at the the value associated with with each house the amount of taxes that are being paid you know i would make an argument

that you know we shouldn't turn a blind eye to some of these projects and i and i think when you get you know it's free money it's essentially what it is it's you know the federal government wants to print money and hand them out to the communities we need to take advantage of it and part of it is all the infrastructure prod and i think this this entire council has been

on on the on the same page in terms of how we want to see the open money spent um i think it would be foolish for us not to really start investing and turning this money that is free that there's no cost to and i say the taxpayers the local taxpayers because i know the money's coming from taxpayers at the federal level but you know at the local level there's no

there's no burden on the taxpayers and we should be taking care of neighborhoods such as the individuals that came before us with the flooding right and other areas that we've just ignored because we don't have the uh the funding to really kind of address it or it's a larger project than we can really truly afford so where do we stand in terms of the total appropriations to the sewer department

so for the sewer department uh currently we haven't had any uh appropriations for work within the sewer department within the water department we've had the 13.5 million dollars that was that was provided that was guaranteed by the administration we are moving forward with design of the contract one opera funding contract won that is uh was when we put the numbers together that was estimated at 8.5 million dollars um

that is under design we're hoping to have a contract bid out by june the problem that i'm seeing right now and across the board is the change in construction cost um you know things that were estimated four months ago six months ago the numbers aren't aren't going to be anywhere close anymore uh i just heard about another uh community that bid out a uh a lodge um a lodge water project

and the contractor went to purchase the pipe order the pipe and they were given a delivery date of september for water main that was expected to go in the ground this year so supply chain issues uh causing an issue when you run into supply chain issues you run into cost issues so you know that's what's projected right now contract one the other thing as i said i'm managing uh my staff and my

staff's ability to be able to manage some of these contracts uh other arpa money that has been allocated to us is through the state uh through the state there was um uh between uh principal forgiveness uh and um arpa it was just under 10 million dollars that was given to us for our principal reduction on the contract two at the wastewater treatment plan uh that was roughly about uh seven or eight million dollars

and then we also had uh there was about a million that was uh allocated towards the wilson road pump station which is currently out to bid that was a combination of ej principal reduction as well as uh as well as the arpa funding from the state within a more recent release that was given from the governor's office i heard there may be more money coming from the state through opera for water work within the city

um but see when that money actually comes so i got to be honest i think the entire council is still going to continue to advocate for additional opera monies coming down to to water and sewer i think that's something we want to see but i will say um before i yield that you know i'm i'm pretty impressed that you only have a one percent increase in in your your budget given especially as

you mentioned the the uh the inflation that we're seeing in everything um you know just forget forget the cost of living adjustments for you know our underpaid staff as it stands right so uh two and a half percent increases is not going to even touch what you're going to have for health care increases right so everything that we're seeing has been significantly increased um the cost just

to get you know equipment and materials has significantly increased into your point the lead time to get these items uh is through the roof so i just i would just urge my you know my colleagues to you know just be cognizant of the fact that there are this is very unique times in terms of you know the the cost to do business um especially when you're dealing with a a

budget of you know 92 percent roughly 92 percent of fixed costs um you know when you see these types of increases it's we've got to absorb it right so the uh the revenue in in terms of where we can generate the revenue uh again we are a municipality right we don't sell widgets we don't sell a project product we can't increase you know the cost of our products we don't have a profit margin

uh the only way we generate revenues is through fees and taxes right and unfortunately nobody wants to see increases in fees and nobody wants to see increases in taxes and i think my colleagues will ask some some difficult questions in terms of trying to hold everybody accountable which i agree with to make sure that you know the increases that we're having are going to benefit the the end user and that we've been as

efficient as possible and and tried to streamline some of the the costs that we see here but again as i mentioned from prior years when was dealing with the water institute there's not a not a whole lot it's a very lean budget in my opinion some people may disagree with me but it's a very lean budget on on both sides so i appreciate that and i'll yield and listen to my colleagues

thank you counselor counselor and c3 council vice president dion thank you thank you everybody for coming welcome for your first meeting ms almond miss pius pious my first question probably should go to the city administrator after last year's debacle i want to clarify what taking action is we have 45 days within submission to act on the water and sewer budget so when did the clock start

what constitutes taking action to make sure that we stay within our parameters yes please madam clerk you have that date as well i'm sorry you have the date the fourth day date you want to send it to me if the date was which is this letter of march 14th does it count all days or just business days if it counts all days with 33 days in if it's only business days with 24 days in

so my country i think we talked about this could you speak into the microphone oh i'm so sorry so my count is that the the deadline would be i think thursday of this week the 28th um so we are more or less up against it uh but certainly in advance of there being us being attitude okay so in terms of the city council taking action what constitutes taking action so the council has three options as we

all know we can uh reduce reject or approve uh and i would uh suggest that any three of those things constitutes an action okay i'm just going for clarification we all know what happened last year you know and and i'm not taking any chances this year on anything all right so with that said um the 13 million dollars in opera funding that you were originally allocated you didn't actually end up with a 13 million it was

reduced the 8.5 is that correct it's never been told to me that it's going to be reduced i've been told that that additional funding is sitting there again i'm trying to manage projects within my division i don't want to take on more than we're able to manage so that's why i have not moved forward with what i'm calling contract two of the opera funding okay um yeah and the bill that you were

referring to is a 3.5 billion dollar economic bill i have it here forward legislation within this it also has a higher now program which provides grants to employers to train and hire new workers of 25 million is that something that your department could utilize if the city were so inclined is to apply for this funding you know uh training of our operators both water and sewer is

something that we're always striving to do currently there's free classes that can be taken at bcc through a grant program for students there to be able to achieve up to their grade two license uh through the blue center at bcc uh we've worked with uh durfee and uh we actually were working to get two students duel enrolled uh seniors at durfee as well as going to bcc to try to

move that forward one thing that i have been in touch with is the uh local the training office within city hall we've had conversations with them in the past you know there may be the opportunity for funding but the tough thing is getting a large enough group of people together that would want to take this specific class to be able to hold our own class we do provide funding to any of our

staff members that are interested in getting training for to become a licensed operator in terms of um yeah there's also 64 for clean water projects uh 1.4 million for culvert projects is there's quite a bit in this bill that i would hope that the city could um capitalize on yeah so is that the bipartisan infrastructure or the federal bill that you're talking about or is that the allocation this is the baker

polito administration uh 3.5 billion economic development is that the most recent one that was released over the past it was released april 21st okay so that's the one that's just released and from my understanding there is funding in there for some of our water projects um lit service removal um as long as the whole entire bill bills approved as proposed from my understanding so yes

that is a very good you know culverts we did apply this year for the grant culvert program um for one of our culverts uh you know grant funding from my standpoint you've got to understand grant funding is something uh jane deviazio our grant writer uh i think she's been living in my office i've been living in her the past month and a half we've probably submitted about 12 million dollars in

grant applications in the past uh month and a half um where we have uh we have a lot more in the near future that we are submitting that's something that you know if my rate pays don't have to pay for it i love those projects all the more it works for me as well i've been a very strong proponent of opera funding go into your department without a doubt yes um and you know i

mean we did say last year you know what we could do last year wouldn't affect last year's rates but moving forward and in the future we certainly could affect um rates in the taxpayers so that's basically what i'm looking for my last question is the the water department owns over a hundred properties within the city of fall river correct i i don't know the number off the top of

my hand but we do own a fair number of properties with it yes and either have already or will be purchasing another 16 acres uh we have proposals to purchase uh some which is off of yellow hill road that is a back lot that's developable on a house it's within our copper cut watershed adjacent to bioreserve land okay i guess my question would be do we now or are there any plans to utilize these properties

as a cost-saving measure in terms of solar farms wind energy anything like that could that could reduce expenses or reduce costs or um or to derive income somehow from some of these properties that we that we hold so a lot of the properties that we do hold and we're crossing into water but i'm a perfectly fine answer and answering this question the questions um the uh a lot of the properties that we

do own so 45 acres over on the other side of the northwater those are all lands that are part of the bioreserve those have specific conservation restrictions on them when they were in misterio can speak uh very well about this um because he uh he was here when the buyer reserve was created uh created 18 000 acres uh which opened up a lot of the water department lands for passive recreation use um

hiking trails biking trails hunting and other uh uses within the conservation restrictions the land that's out in that area the conservation restriction would wouldn't the conservation restrictions wouldn't allow any uh any use for those uh for those types of uses uh other properties that we uh that we only either in the city or in the city proper or around the city uh are typically uh for wetland

conservation drainage reasons or you know our water tanks or properties that we that we have pump stations on or other things for uh you know so solar use uh we're always looking to um possibly you know um a new water maintenance building that building is being designed so that the roof could be leased out for potential solar use we do have solar panels down at our water treatment plant currently

there was a study done years ago about wind uh being installed down at the wastewater treatment plant but then there was a moratorium put on that size wind towers within the city in that area um so with the new push with wind energy do you think uh has there been any discussion on those restrictions do you know that that might change not that i'm aware of because yes if i may um we also aggressively um

go for tower rentals on our water tanks and those have been producing revenue since the advent move into the city of cellular telephone so we're taking advantage wherever we can um but i'm always on the lookout for additional revenue because that's the hard part right we paul and i were talking this evening if i could just take a second and um we were comparing um gallons pumped per day and

when i was actively working i was running sixteen three sixteen four sixteen point four million gallons a day pulse pumping about nine and a half to ten on a on a stretch um all that went away was the industrial base of fall river at that time the dye houses and the finishing houses and the only thing we're left with is spawn finishing today and we were we were discussing that our problem is is one of

we need to increase sales and when i say we're constantly looking at ways to do it we are um but you're somewhat limited you certainly don't want to clear cut your watershed to to you know put up solar you wouldn't be able to do it in the first place and it wouldn't be a practical or you know a responsible move by the water board but um believe me we've sky-balled some

some things it's it's tough what we need is a big buyer that's you know i'd love to see a brewery love to see a bottling plant it's just not in the cards counselor well maybe we need to start going out and looking for that we did in the past have breweries in fall river i'm sorry we did in the past have a brewery in fall river no hefn rougher bro bro which one brown

we had a bowl of bones too you had uh half and rough half and ruffled on and if you go back you also had a coca-cola bottling plant on the ball street um i don't re oh you have frosty beverage i believe down in quickly um but that you know what we need is what we missed back um about 2004 um when um sam adams was talking about going into um a sauna

to the wirehouse or property over there they were going to use a rail spur there and we were talking about directly hooking them up that would have been sweet but it's it's just one of consumption we don't sell enough product right now okay thank you with that i yield thank you counselor counselor did you have your hand raised i did let's earn seven my turn yes we should sell our own water since we

have so much of it but bottle it and sell it employ people ball river water i think that my cardinal seat number one said it best if we have to have an increase the end users need to see the results and i i've got to tell you i'm i'm a little disappointed with the calls that i have gotten as of late get a call from a gentleman everybody on the council knows who it is

he got a water bill for twelve thousand dollars he owns a couple of pieces of property in the city in a business he said bills come in we pay him they go out never got a bill but he got a demand and he hadn't paid his water supposedly for five years how do we let somebody not pay water for five years and not shut their meter do we do that

no so that's not a that's not a typical uh circumstance that we have um that particular customer there was uh the house and if i'm if i am talking about the customer that uh that you are the house was told that it was turned off to us it was on our records of being turned off we were called out there to turn it off a number of years ago

we were never told that the uh that it was turned back on it was never alerted to us so there was no readings that were being done on the uh usage of the water that went through the meter when the property owner called for a final reading on that meter we went out and all the water that passed through that meter over the prior years was then registered and billed

but then it was going to be a demand plus interest that's not fair mr phillip that's not fair if there was a mistake and we didn't know you got to eat the mistake and i mean i know that it was rectified and you know that doesn't have to happen but they'll pay it all off during the year now i get another one at president avenue so the first water bill they get is 83 000

for three months clearly that's a lot of water that's a mistake they fixed that october's bill is two thousand five hundred dollars they get their bill in december a thousand five hundred dollars i know they changed the meter on that one but again whenever anybody's water bill is high you know what the classic line is you got a toilet running you gotta leak somewhere that's all the time but to me things like this

don't show the end users that we care about them i understand that we have to increase you have a problem at the waste water treatment plant with keeping employees there because they can get a lot more money going elsewhere and they're going and when the state came down and evaluated us it's adequate conditional and inadequate and we fell to conditional and they cited it's because of management finances and

staffing so something needs to be done now i know frederick street has been a nightmare for us but now i get a call from frederick street that building in the back there's a water thing that goes by brings all kinds of mosquitoes the man has a trailer camper the rats that they're getting there in that water they chewed all the wires in the camper they even chewed the bristles off of the toothbrushes not right

now you had a young couple bought a house in full river going a lot pays a little more on taxes but they've called several times i mean we had the pictures here you might want to take a look at the pictures i wouldn't want to live that way either and when we put in it was ray mitchell put in a resolution i think i might have co-signed it with him

and it was about if somebody gets a really high water bill that you can go in and appeal one time the way that it was supposed to work was that if you went into appeal the water department the board would take the average of the entire year divided by four that would be your bill that's not what happens that's not what happens right so so the appeal process what was presented to the

council approved by the council uh and just to talk a couple of things about what you said uh that is the proposal that was given to the council at the time and what still stands is that uh there is an average taking of the prior bills once the leak stopped there's an average taken of the prior bills 50 of of the overage above the average is credited and that's what's done in

our policy and that's what was proposed to the council um i've gone back and i've see i've pulled out what was actually what was actually given to the council and approved to the by the council i just think it's not fair to go by the average and you go 50 more whatever the other thing was that the water department was supposed to let the owner of the property know if you see that person's water rate

their usage is increasing to let the person know you call them say hey you're using a lot of water i mean i know in canada when people were renting houses and growing pot inside of these houses the way that the police caught them was because of the amount of water that people were using in the amount of electricity so there's got to be a way to measure that and i think something like that should

be done people don't mind paying more and water is is that's that's sacred as far as i'm concerned if you don't have water you have nothing but i understand what some of these people are feeling i know what you know what the mr and mrs justino are feeling and if you got off the money and uh attorney atkins is here as city administrator what did somebody say did i say atkins did i say it right aitkins

okay i'll answer anything okay um i think you should take back a message to the mayor that the council wants some of this oppa money spent on resolving problems like this for some people i'm sorry i appreciate your concerns i absolutely do it's the money that you're you're on the water and sewer budget we are on the water and sewer and all i'm talking about was water and sewer i know

that people are going to pay it if people are going to pay it and people are going to pay more then they deserve a service and i don't feel they're getting it so that needs to be clarified and if we have the oppor money it should be used now when you talk about sewer you said viola isn't there someone else that just bought that didn't someone else take over viola's contract no

no violia is still in their contract goes out till uh 2023. is there somebody else coming in is there talk of that there's no there's no talk of it once once it's required we'll put out an rfq for procurement um but there hasn't been any rfq issued or anything here i heard somebody else was involved there now no so the only thing that did happen is violia procured uh which is a worldwide

corporation procured suez which is another worldwide corporation uh but it's they're still underneath the viola suez yes i thought suez bought viola not from my understanding though oh all right because we really need to pay attention down there as well but to me you need to spend some of this money on making sure that you have the staff in the wastewater treatment plant because we shouldn't be in conditional

we should be back inadequate and it amazes me that the quality of our water is good and even though the state mandates that we put other chemicals in it that we have good water we don't need those other chemicals but the state mandates that we put them in that to me is a little ludicrous the state of massachusetts is a very very regulated state on both water and wastewater it's contaminated i

understand that yeah you know we're currently dealing with all the regulations that they continue to throw at us but it's like we're spending money on chemicals that thankfully our water doesn't need maybe there's another oxygen in it or something and we still have to do it i'm going to tell you that i'll support an increase because i i really think that you need one but um i'm doing this halfway

because i really feel that people need to have problems result people need to get a call when their water bill is going high they need to know that is there a way for you to figure that out yes so through our new through the new metering system we do get we do get information we get reports uh we have been reaching out to those customers historically we've done letters

and that's how we continue to do it as of now we've been working on building uh uh i would love it to get to a point where we can email customers a lot more people are using that as a method for communication now um but it's building that email database of our 24 000 accounts uh to be able to get to that point but that is something that we're working towards

the sooner the better i think that's important to the people but other than that i i will support it uh oh one last question i have i don't know the building that you're building up is the water department yes the new world was there cso money used there for the store so the sewer department is funding a portion of that building for uh storage of their equipment as well as the maintenance facility that will

maintain their equipment how much 2.5 million so the sewer department is paying 2.5 million to store stuff to store stuff because of the wash bay that's there as well as the uh maintenance facilities that will be working on servicing and repairing their vehicles yes and that was voted on by the council i think it might have been the year that i skipped the that was part of so many so that was part of the 123 million

dollar authorization which include uh storage of back to trucks and stuff like that that was all included within that large authorization that was uh voted on on referendum ballot november 2017 seems a little odd to me but i wouldn't have voted for that if i was here so just sharing that with you with that i yield thank you thank you concerned c4 5 council lee thank you thank you for uh coming up here

talking to us for a little bit um one of the uh when when opera was mentioned by counselors in c1 and c7 i remembered the state of the city um addressed by the mayor and he stated something that was going to come down from congressional delegation uh 10 million or so that could be used um for any type of city needs um i asked and at that time about roads

um however do we have i don't maybe you don't maybe maybe mr aiken has it um do we have an idea of when that money was coming or did it already come to the city this is the federal um yeah about 10 million or so i believe was stated in the state of the city and i'm just curious as to did we receive that funding or has it come down the

line yet or so if you're talking about federal money uh there's been conversations with um uh representative oshion class uh and other members of the delegation about earmarks if you're talking about that that's not settled yet with regard to the bill that was filed on the 21st by uh the governor and the lieutenant governor there are some proposed expenditures for lead service reduction in there

and that's a significant amount so i'm not exactly i'd have to go back to the speech to find out exactly what 10 million dollars he's talking about because i think that both in a state and federal level uh there's the hope that there's that there's some money uh coming okay thank you um the last time we had this conversation about an increased request you stated to us i believe and please

correct me if i'm not um if i'm not accurate you stated that the debt service were was one of the major reasons why we needed to see an increase is that correct uh so to see an increase not necessarily on the debt service this year but debt service does go up and down depending on when loans come on board and when loans go off debt service is a major portion of our budget yep okay regarding the

sewer disposal do you have do you ha i know that sewer disposal was a was one of the reasons why we had increases in the past meaning that sludge disposal i'm sorry sludge disposal so that that went from one cost to another to a significant increase once we had to start shipping it to uh i think at the time it was main but i'm not 100 sure yes so in uh march of 2016 we had to

shut down our incinerator down at our wastewater treatment plant so our incinerator uh was taking a sludge essentially burning it off uh and leaving us with ash um once our incinerator was shut down uh now our sludge is taken primarily to cranston to an incinerator that they have there if it's not taken to cranston we also have other facilities in either norgatech connecticut turnkey landfill up in new hampshire

and there's a couple other outlets that uh are around and it went from the the figures back then yeah when you didn't have to ship it out yeah i believe it was roughly about 900 000 or so 850 to run our incinerator um to uh about 2 million for offset so so that increase is still in effect correct we still it costs about 2 million dollars to ship our sludge out and that's

2.2 2.3 we're spending now is that is that on our budget here is that indicated anywhere here in our budget yep so that is well it's a particular line item that has uh sludge as well as some other disposal cost in it uh that would be under other purchase services okay um so that has sludge as well as rags and trash and other things that we dispose of from the wastewater treatment

plant and and that's one of the things i was looking at here as some of the increases that we saw from uh from the fy 2022 to fye to propose budget of fy 2023. so other professional services the increase is estimated or roughly around 300 000 correct yeah a little bit under that but again what what creates that increase so that essentially our uh disposal costs for uh trucking

uh this sludge as well as uh what the uh end facility is charging us to dispose of that so the increase is three about three hundred thousand dollars and then the increase for the other purchase services is 120 000 correct or around that figure so other professional services is an increase of about three hundred thousand dollars so that went from seven point one to seven point four if that if

that's what you're targeting yep other and so if you wanna other professional services is primarily aviolia contract okay uh so that's the contractual increase that's the three hundred thousand dollars is that incrementally roughly it's it's been pretty much a straight increase for the past uh i think we're going into year eight of our contract uh and it will be uh again we'll be rebidding that

contract coming up i believe rfqs will be going out next year for a new contract within the following year other purchase services is the sludge and trash disposal and yes there was an increase in that and again that was due to uh you know you got to think we're getting anywhere from nine to 12 tankers that'll leave in our facility today having to uh go to rhode island so with fuel costs and everything

else you know you see an increase there some of the some of the actuals line up fairly well with what was proposed in 2022 um but some of them some of them kind of some of them have increases and um just some of the ones and if you can explain some of these like the actual for fy 21 for um the line item engineering and architecture service you're somewhere just over 8 700 but the

proposed uh budget is 20 000.

so i was just curious as to what would create an increase for that so again those are line items that's right at the bottom um okay i got it so uh in there we we carry different line items uh ms4 nifties permit compliance so uh ms4 is the municipal sewer small sewer storm water system regulation that was put into effect about four years ago every year we hire a consultant to assist us with

doing the training for our staff that's required for that regulation uh illicit discharge training uh tracking of illicit discharge going through testing all of our discharges that that go out uh into the stormwater system um so sometimes particularly is if we're able to do more of that training in-house or use previous things we take advantage of that by doing it in-house and not having to

use that consultant as much so that's why you would see an actual uh savings within that line item what do you do with that saving that's it is that what gets contributed to the uh 100 000 that you allot for stabilization or things like that no if you look stabilization if you go uh higher up within your within your budget right there is a transfer to stabilization uh of 100 000

so any savings that you see from that actual compared to what we actually what was budgeted um that's essentially uh will end up at the end of the year getting turned out as free cash or retained earnings um you know it's tough with an enterprise fund because you have your uh you have your expenses and you have your revenues so your enterprise fund your revenues need to be higher than your expenses um

so that you cover all of your or they're supposed to be exactly the same but as you go through the fiscal year if you you know a lot of people in my department know me as being very frugal so anywhere where there's savings i will try to pick up those savings um so that may end up you know and it's tough looking at this budget um and i hate using this excuse because everybody's

sick and tired of hearing it when you're talking fy21 which was you know the stata covered those numbers are all over the place that's those are valid those are valid reasons no one here should be yeah i know it's just in society everybody says i'm sick of hearing the covet excuse but you know when you're talking 20 21 22 we're on a roller coaster here we're riding a wave coming out of covet budgets

straight across the board uh so it's it's a tough thing and we're riding right now like i said the volatile market with the uh supplies and everything else that's still an effect from profit so two more two more line items that i did see just to signif just the just the disparaging number between the two um the actuals and what was budget even for fy 22 uh compared to 21 postage yep

you go from about 11 000 here and your proposed budget was 34 and then you also propose it again for fy23 and i'm just you know there's a that's a 20 000 difference there so i was just yeah so postage is a shared cost between water and sewer uh so depending on the year on revenues and stuff like that you gotta make a determination where the majority of that postage comes from or it get it

gets shared between the costs so um you know i'm sure if you look in the prior year i believe actually sewer postage was was higher than the budgeted amount in that prior fiscal year but that's a shared cost so sometimes it hits water differently than a hit sewer and then the last one would be um where it says other improvements and that's in the plant capital yep lines so other improvements at that

capital line item that we carry so you go from 34 or about 35 little over 35 000 but the proposal was 80. yep so again so a capital budget is uh is a larger lot of things that we uh that we like to purchase uh again you know you're talking uh fy21 the last three months four months of that budget was uh was locked down on covid so

a lot of stuff at that point was put on hold you know totally stopped because a you know either there wasn't any place to get particular items there wasn't any suppliers to be able to provide uh supplies at that time um so some stuff was put on hold that's why that was that was reduced what is budgeted within the fy23 for capital uh is a medium duty pickup truck um emergency repairs so that would be if

a sewer line breaks or uh we have to hire a private contractor to come in to do some type of emergency repair within the sewer wastewater system uh detention basins and swale improvements so if we have a small project on detention based north wales that needs to be dealt with and then we're also carrying a budget for cso notification which is a new dep regulation that's coming out uh that

we're gonna have to deal with uh full notification whenever any of our csos are activated i i tried to make sure all my questions were related both to the to the budget and not going you know not going off on things but um you know my at the very first opera meeting we had it i was on i was up on a stage saying that the sewer and water needs this

money more than possibly any of the other ones when it comes to taking care of our communities that and and we would like to see a lot of public safety as well i believe that those two areas that opera funding should be dedicated mostly to um places like tiffany drive and so many other places that we've took that we the entire council for the most part has walked around and and seen these

neighborhoods um it's it's it's bad it's rough and i and i just urge the mayor's office to really consider some of this funding going to some of these to many of these areas if not all of them um because this we don't know when this kind of funding is going to come down the line again and you see how tight everything is when it comes to this so um that i yield and i won't

spend much more time on that so thank you thank you counselor counselor c2 council camara thank you thank you um and thank you guys for coming down and going through this darkly quick question the sewer department's paying 2 million for the building that we're building what's the total cost on that building uh so the total construction cost the contract is uh 8.65 what's the construction contract

cost how many square feet is it uh 20 000 square feet roughly with the second floor on a portion of it okay one i think i just want to go back to counseling seat seven was talking about the individual there that i guess the meter was shut off or was disconnected what you give snare that once the video shut off it was turned back on but no one know it

yeah so if we get a call first shut off a property is abandoned or something like that we get a call for a shut off and in the wreck in our notes on the account again if this is the account that was speaking i don't know who was i actually said i would know that that's my colleagues and see two and three you know what i don't know yeah so i don't

want to know but i just want to know how i remember a recent case you know it was a while ago where property was abandoned we were called out there to turn off the water we went out turned off the water at the curb stop uh it seems as if there may have been repairs made to the building or something like that the curb stop was turned on we were not notified how turned it on

i can't tell you who has the authority to turn it on so the water department is the only one that has the authority to turn it on if anybody else does turn it on it would be a violation of the ordinance uh so again so do we have a locking system in there locking mechanism that this is not the first time this has happened mr terry i think you remember before there was someone

that turned into meter and then they had three years ago free water remember that one so how does that work we don't have a locking mechanism when someone turns off the city turns off the water and then you can just go back there with a wrench and turn it back on so we go out and it's the curb stop typically the curb stop on the street uh you know it has a

penta bolt on it no we don't there is no locking mechanism or anything that we have to be able to uh lock people out of that you know again we're not locking people out of anything they're requesting it be turned off and we're turning it off yep and somehow it gets turned back on and we don't know about it so we're not locking anybody out everything if it's turned off it's turned off correct someone's turning it

on without permission or consent from the city correct and it's costing the city a lot of money and people's rates are going up because we're not maintaining and watching that and it's not the first time it's happened that's why i get a little upset about it yep what do we do to check on that do we go by periodically and see that it's still turned off or it's turned on i mean it's

that's not hard to do how many people turn off the water services throughout the course of a year i'm guessing not very many you know you got to think about all the uh all the event it would be you know all the abandoned properties or unoccupied properties throughout the city um you know that are turned off or any that are under major renovation or anything like that you know with over 20 000 accounts

to monitor who's particularly on and who's off would be a tough thing uh with our current staffing that we do have i i i trust me your frustration is shared um because that is not something that you know meter being turned on like that um us not getting uh getting the readings through our system is something that uh that is it's cost me money frustrating yes you know luckily that house did have

a meter and luckily we were able to build that there's been other cases where houses didn't have a meter that that could be a different story yeah well it's happened so i think what we need to do is if we get a call that's turned off i know you don't i mean let's let's find out a way that we can at least periodically have someone go by and check and see

whether there is water running in the building or not because that's that's a serious concern it's not fair to the people that are paying they're not doing it the right way that their rates are going up um i don't want to go out too much about because you guys explained it through a lot of questions are asked but you know the council's going to put a resolution together to try to help those

poor people up there with the situation and i know it's not the first time you're aware of it correct yes just yes or no is there a solution can we help them out uh so their problem stems stems from the issue in stafford square we are just in that issue aren't we are we making changes at staffordshire uh so we have done a study of stafford square the uh the work uh to

correct that issue the estimates have come back at uh to do the whole entire project at about 45 million all right well i'll wait for what comes out of that meeting and we'll try to discuss it but i think we should try to do something to try to help people like that and everyone else that's in the same situation it's not fair to them my favorite all that they weren't warned

and that they didn't know that this is a problem and uh let's try to resolve it you know it's maybe we can use some federal money some grant money let's see what we can do because i'm sure it's not the only place to city what's happening stanford square is a major problem yeah correct all right with that at you thank you so much thank you councilman clark did you say that item was already in committee

it is it's in the public works and transportation committee for tiffany drive what's in committee appreciation i believe the resolution for the the folks that have the flooding on tiffany drive it's in public works yes good thank you i mean it's here tiffany drivers here water goes up not a scientist on water but usually water flows down here it's in committee i'm sure they'll figure it out counseling

really easy question for you so the new metering that's happening the new meters you're putting in does that at all help the issue that we're talking about with the water being used without knowledge yeah so the new system that we're installing and we're still get we've finally completed the installation of all of our eight new amr boxes uh throughout the whole entire city uh we've replaced roughly about 10 of the

meters the ones where we had to enter the house one of the issues that we did find through that replacement program is we had pretty low numbers of return from our customers um you know to be able to allow us to enter the property that's something that we're going to be working with our staff to be able to get into those properties um but with that new system that will uh that it with just

fine-tuning some of the reporting and stuff like that but that will hopefully help us with uh whether it be a reverse flow or whether it be uh a water potentially on a meter that should be off as long as all of the uh equipment is working and not disconnected yes and that's like an automatic reporting process yeah so that back to you that goes into a cloud a system that's uh a computer

system in the cloud by neptune which is the meter company that's also how we get all of our reads for our building thank you i yield thank you councillor and seat for council kilby yes thank you madam president so just to pick it back council come out this question um which i was going to ask about these these people here because we all looked at the pictures it's just a horror show the way they're living um

so you said it's all related to staff at square and it's a 45 million dollar project so it was anything short of that that we can do to help them and i know what's going to committee and it's going to be discussed but i might not watch the meeting i'm not a member of that committee yeah so i would like maybe uh i know you know it's on the fly but

you're yeah you're the expert in the city that handles these problems so is anything short putting a pumping station down there or just doing something to to alleviate uh that problem down there because i think it's our responsibility as a city to handle things like that for these people who are so so aggrieved yeah so it's a very tough situation because you end up getting the you know it's a huge

drainage area that starts all the way back up at locust and oak grove that's kind of where this drainage area starts that that comes down to this area um and it comes down some in culverts some over the roadways uh comes down into that area there's actually a major culvert that uh uh right where jaycees is on bedford street a lodge culvert that comes down and there's three culverts that come together from

the old quarry where the housing complex is those culverts come together in the middle of bedford street they continue across over next to the tiffany drive area and they they continue down in some culverts in stafford square problem is you have so much water coming into this area into these culverts that are undersized for the high uh intensity rainstorms um you know reporting that

i've got i know that on september 2nd uh when we had six and a half inches of rain in six and a half hours overnight um the these people were affected uh there was another later storm that was a high intensity storm um that these uh this area was affected uh i've been through on smaller or moderate rainstorms which the drainage within that area is is functioning um well you know it's these uh

high-intensity rainstorms that that you know we have issues with so i'm sorry interrupt you mr frilling but is there something short of 45 million that we can do to alleviate the problem there you know for this whole entire drainage area uh that's the fix for that whole entire area the whole entire project is broken up into different phases so going up to that particular phase may be less

it takes up a certain you want to start at the bottom and work your way up so there is a full report in a study that was done on that area um but you know i can prepare a presentation for the public works committee um and if anybody else be beneficial i think and i agree with constantly and i think it was counseling and counselor dion and others on the council that uh

the arpa money i mean we've had flooding issues council lady has mentioned it i think a million times last budget cycle and there's some big time flooding issues here and i think a segment of that money should go towards uh that one time expenditure um i know we have the we have fro ed bristol county uh consultant i'm sorry the name uh that is you know uh having the grants for businesses and things like that um

whether that is going to um amount to helping a business fifteen hundred dollars or five thousand dollars i mean it probably will slightly but maybe some of that money would have been more wisely spent on your department so lots of money money money uh you know monday morning quarterback this but that's just what i'm thinking um and so i won't you don't have to comment on that that's

just a general statement and uh the other question i had is you purchase the chemicals which is always very very important in your budget how about the issues down at south what's up upon because i haven't got a ton of calls with regard that to that but the beach that was put together by council pereira and others and the issues with regards to the water down there is what's going on

uh in that area yeah so um southward tupper pond is something that uh you know we've had algae issues in that pond for 50 60 70 plus years uh something that we're working on luckily last year is able to secure funding from bay coast bank to be able to start a phase one study of that uh we've joined partners with uh both westport and tibetan to try to work to

find a solution to that i have had a couple of public outreach meetings on the on the studies that we've done the uh you know the latest one was about a month ago at the uh at the umass building over on the edge of the northwest upper pond we're using umass to assist with the stamp sampling and studying within the pond as well as a consultant would encourage to evaluate the watershed

we are continuing to move forward actually a grant that we submitted a letter of interest today was for funding to continue that to work on projects and we have another grant that's due in a week and a half through the mvp program that'll assist us with uh with other with other studying that we need to do over this summer and uh moving forward on some remediation projects within that

watershed so that's something um you know if anybody is interested the power points from the presentation i know this is getting off the budget i'm sorry but it's on our it's on a website that we have called the watapa reserve dot com um so those power points are up there and also forever government tv did uh record both of those presentations 2023 budget there's is there anything any increase to

be allocated towards that or it's still on hold it's not allocated towards uh towards the south with upper pond so far uh so far we've been able to get again the private funding from both bay coast bank we do have grant funding there was a state air mark that that was secured by senator rodriguez as well as rep schmidt 50 dollars that we'll be using this summer to be able to move that plus the

two grants that we're applying involved with that as well uh westport we we aren't we uh they are we signed it into municipal agreement last last year uh with web support in tibetan to continue to look at the water quality of the south we'll talk about and better the water quality within the south with tupper thank you madam president thank you thank you i'll say something counselor in seat seven

i'll say something to that both of you gentlemen mr terry and mr grillman talked about how we can generate money for the water department part of the problem with the southward tupper is that all of the homes along the water if they have lawns and they're putting chemicals on their lawns that those chemicals when it rains comes right down in and that some of those fertilizers uh create

some of the algae there's not enough oxygenation in the water etc however we own that we own that pond we own 10 feet from the shoreline because there's no low and high guide right 10 feet everybody in westport and tibbetting along the water puts in a dock fall river you put in a dock on this side you need to go to the building department you need to pay for a building permit your tax on it right

messiah capone they pay taxes but we don't get any money from them and they're putting docks into our water they should have to pay us a fee too because we own it and we own 10 feet over i don't know what's happening now at the rod and gun club i heard they sold it and they were doing some digging there but that was at the last meeting that we had the meeting we had at the

rope company but now this meeting was very good it was well attended but most of the people were from westport and tibetan there were very few people there from fall river um i think it's wonderful i have a niece that lives on the pond her in-laws live on the pond they all have docks i think it's a beautiful thing i don't represent westport i represent fall river and i want my money coming here if it

was in the opposite and tibetan or westport owned it you better believe we would be paying to have docks on the floor riverside into something they owned it's not fair but that's a way to get money and sell some of your land be a street sell it meridian sell it because that's not even near the watershed but i can make you money if you want i'll sit down with you i can make you

the council president she's into real estate she can get your money too maybe even more than me with that i yield thank you thank you anything further on this before he goes on counselor in seat six are we saying it's gonna cost 45 million dollars to take care of their problem to take care of the issue within that watershed and she's one of the issues they're within that watershed 45 million

does it make sense to say well we're going to straighten it out it makes more sense to say listen we're going to help you out we're not going to spend 45 million but there's something we can do like hey give her the money and let it go part of the problem is the city of fall river too that gave the building permit either to them or the people before them that creates the problem

nobody on this committee is going to say spend the 45 million to take care of that problem so that's what you got to look at i certainly wouldn't support it but it's not paid to them kind of problem they got but they're not really getting anything from you to satisfy these people not okay it's going to take what even if you had the money you're not going to do it it doesn't make any sense so

you should think about it get together and do what you got to do that's what you got to do and then and the other issue is uh the media readers what the do we read music bombed out who is the meters so yeah we do you do so why do we read all the meters i don't care if the house is empty or not you read the meter you know if there's no water going

through the pipe well you know then it's shut off i mean to me it makes a lot of sense how many people get their houses shut off and they'll go by well this one used so much oh this one didn't use no water but you know before prior you know they used it they didn't use it and now they're using it so does that make more sense you know i i can tell you if a an

account one the way that we read the meters is the billing system sends out all the meters that are active uh if we have it in the billing system that a an account the meat is turned off uh it will not call to read that meter again if this is an abandoned house that potentially has you know either damage or has been removed it may not have a radio box we don't physically go around

and read the meters anymore they're all sent by a radio box back to uh back to the computer system so if it's a if it's an inactive account i i definitely understand what you're saying um yeah i mean it makes sense to me you read it anyway how many inactive accounts do you think you have well i i would have to look it up accounted systems and see i can't tell you of the time

i wanted to take the original meter so to any meter all the meters well again it's all done they're done daily by back to our or don't use it that's the point you know i mean to me it's not a problem that's what you do and you get the answers that's only common sense as far as but i didn't go that far in school so maybe i don't make sense with that i

yield thank you thank you thank you counselor anything further mr perlin um nope i didn't thank you thank you

he can leave it

i think we're going to definitely have to pull yes now at this point item is on the floor this long i think we're going to definitely have to vote yes we're still in in uh session that item is on for discussion is there a motion to refer to the full body so moved motion made to refer the water and sewer budget to second full council by council kadeem second by council raposo all those in favor aye

aye any opposed still voted item force discussion of the fiscal year 2022-43 budget members of the administration

we're going to be doing the budget next month yeah did you want to speak okay all right sorry i thought you heard me hi folks uh you've all received the quarter three uh the uh obviously at this point in time uh the city seems to be on track for fiscal 22 as far as expenditures got a couple of problems that we're watching on revenues you know that we'll keep an eye on but

the next two months may and june are really the critical months where you really start to you got to pay attention to what's going on a couple of things in the budget so far through through quarter three are retirements and resignations are somewhat problematic and they've been city-wide and uh and why i'm telling you this is because we we buy out people's vacation time and sick leave and things like that if

they've had longevity so presently we charge it and we're hoping that through vacancies and other things there'll be enough money to cover it within the blocks within those appropriation blocks i've got a we've got to watch on it at this point so that we'll keep track of it and make sure that we don't have any real issues because what we'd like to do is sometime in the month of may you know bring the

transfers down you know you should be bringing transfers ongoing rather than trying to wait till the last minute and then things go things go wrong so that's one of the things we'll be uh keeping an eye on the other thing is costs are somewhat problematic you know gasoline things like that keeping an eye on them again you know in the expense budgets you know so that we can be in front of it and not be surprised

at the end of the fiscal year you know that all of a sudden we're good we don't we don't know how we're going to pay for the gas um but the uh like i said the retirement things the other thing is of course revenue unfortunately in municipalities like like fall river huge timing issues you know we see anomalies in the in the way the revenue comes in and then you get you look at it

and you go oh my god where the hell is the money and then all of a sudden it starts to come back in and you can't emphasize enough the covet issues during 20 and 21 that you're still not seeing a complete picture you know of the things of building permits and things like that coming back you know the activity level thank god that for the most part people have been still

spending money in those areas but the next two months are really critical um we will be coming back to the council probably in the next couple of weeks or by your next meeting with some transfers we we need to take care of the issue uh to uh complete our obligations to the school department and you heard that during the presentation we still owe them some money and we're giant we're trying to

we're gonna we're in the process of figuring out which pocket we can get it from without you know getting ourselves into a gym and we will resolve that so you'll see a transfer on that we do we do have some other transfers that will be coming down that are known yeah great i think right in your uh your own department i haven't seen that yet on the city council i think we've got a

buy out that we need to take a look at in uh in the salaries department and i can't remember who it was that we bought out uh allison remember who that was was it who we bought out of at a buyout earlier in the year for um council for the city council yeah it must have been fully yeah it was for the city council audience for kathy howard oh okay all

right so so we'll look at that and make sure that we can either cover that or we'll have to ask for a transfer out of may probably your expense account and move a few dollars into your salary line item um snow and ice we're keeping a tight look on uh we've applied to fema we've been uh we know we're going to be getting some reimbursement money and we also submitted the

snow and ice overage for the last uh 22 inch storm that you had here in fall river so yeah you were in a vacation so um warm i'm sure but anyways uh so we're keeping a close eye on that because that's always an important factor at the end of the year you know uh some years you've been you've had to raise uh the deficit other years you've been able to cover it so we'll keep an

eye on that other than that i don't the other thing is look counselor reposa we have looked at the inactive accounts and we will apply that to the capital plan coming up so you don't know how happy you're making me right now some transfers i'll need we'll need the council's approval to make and others because of the amount we'll be able to just have the uh city audit to make the transfers without the problem

point of clarification just to respond to that yeah so once once that's done you'll be able to provide to us an updated list of inactive capital projects there'll be very little at that point i like the sound of that yeah thank you counselor and seat seven council players uh messiah capone did you look at the website unclaimed money and the city of fall river has a bunch some of it is for john nunes remember

him oh yeah he was here i remember recruiting him so why is all this money unclaimed all accidents insurance companies that they owe his money he's going to check that out that's probably part of it but i'll yeah we will check it out is it is this in the abandoned property yeah oh well we'll have to check it out yeah there must be about 30 40 of them really i looked my name wasn't on anything some

sometimes what happens it's on it's on an outstanding checks and they weren't ever cached and but i'll have to look at that we can we'll access the web page and take a look at it i didn't see my name on there did you no i didn't i just saw john nunes okay did you just change your name yeah you actually saw his name on there yeah really yeah it was city but john nunes okay

probably his treasure they they probably

but you know i mean i like these quarterly budgets it's nice for us to kind of keep an eye on things but to be honest with you quarterly to me it's a little too much if we did it every six months you know halfway through the year give the council an update because you people get all tied up to put this book together instead of doing other work that needs to be done as well

on the revenue side yeah one of the issues is the timing of the way the receipts come in right for example sometime in january you get your big chunk of motor vehicle excise tax revenue so when you're looking at certain numbers from a lot of them you go my god where's the money you know so yeah that's a good point i mean it would be a big help to re i

don't know how we would do that is this uh it's in the charter it is in the charter it is tied to the job the chat that might be something because to me the amount of work that i hear from all the department heads that they have to submit you know every quarter for a budget yeah it's like at least six months halfway through the year we know where we stand

but all the time i i just we don't have the manpower in the city no it's to do all the work that we need to do we need to hire more people good idea some people are burnt out they're working crazy and you know when you have uh one person doing a lot of things you're gonna have errors it's just human nature one person can only do so much and i see

that in several of the departments people need the support so that's just yeah that's my thoughts yeah one quick comment we could produce the uh munis report for city and school expenses uh and send that down rather than all the updating every capital project you know it will you know instead of doing it quarterly there's a way of doing that you could actually get uh get that report maybe quarterly and just print it

out streamline this that's right streamline this report i like her though that's right she's got a streamline yeah that's what we need to do welcome that'll be i'll be looking forward to you streamlining as much as you can for us thank you very much we'll start with the budget with that i yield thank you thank you hey councilman c3 council vice president the um so how many retirements did we have that

weren't anticipated because there's an awful lot i've lost track of them they're almost across the board police fire uh uh every department has basically been uh yeah you know i didn't actually have a i don't actually have a number in my head but it's a lot of them yeah in the police department how many how many retirements were there were negative 245 thousand dollars yeah you probably i don't know

off the top of my head but just this past week i saw two two long term that really weren't completely on the radar screen because during the budget uh process you're asking way ahead of time if there are any known retirements coming up and try to maybe do some handling on that i mean we did have at least one person who was um using comp time for a year prior to retirement that we had we did

have a heads up of a year on that one that was within the police department um and the solid waste disposal expenses there's rent and other rentals and lease and between the two is 45 000 in the hole on that that would be page 21 under expenses

the appropriation for rent was 30 000 and we're at 194 percent so we're in the whole 28 000 on that one and other rentals and leases were in the whole 17 000. why would that be right off hand i well piano i couldn't give you any circle offhand i can check it out easy enough and get you an answer uh overtime salaries 30 000.

wait where is that that's uh under solid waste salaries all the time yeah that's good man wow yeah good yeah so just briefly and this is i'm speculating to a certain extent but there's some context here with regard to solid waste and with regard to especially the inspectors that are going out and citing people or reviewing uh the quality of our recycling and how people are dealing with with solid waste

specifically recycling um if we don't get a handle on that obviously our rate goes up significantly if we have um specifically recycling that that has a lot of contamination um and so um with the folks that we have i think that they're being taxed even more than they ordinarily would be in order to try to really undertake a concerted effort to try to get some of that contamination uh increase down

to try to manage the cost of our of our solid waste in addition to that my sense is that there's been a lot of extra time that's been put into trying to figure out this commercial piece um and so my hope is that uh is that we're moving quickly towards a plan there uh i can speak to that at a different time because there's much more there but i just i just know that there's been

a lot quite a bit going on within that particular segment of dcm and that would probably account for the overtime piece um yeah and in terms of the inspectors are we issuing tickets so the inspectors uh cite people uh for uh any number of of improprieties with regard to uh how they're putting out their uh their waste um whether or not they're they're splitting out recycling and whether

there's recyclable items in the waste so yes there is uh there are tickets that are uh given out uh there are hearings uh that are done in conjunction with the law department and there's revenue that comes from those are we holding people accountable and actually getting paid we are that's good because in the past we've issued tickets and not received payment for them so that's a plus baby steps yeah let's see

i don't know what we generally um appropriate and what we generally expend in terms of rock salt sand and gravel um but we're at double so this is a particularly challenging winter and obviously i think everyone here knows that even when the accumulation doesn't necessitate plowing frequently the way we're able to keep the streets in reasonable shape is brining and salting and sanding and all that sort of thing

so even though if you think about the the the plowable events that we had this year there were maybe as many more times when we salted and sanded and then of course uh there was the big january 29th event there was another february 14th event and then i believe there was also one in early march perhaps no a lot of that if i may is has been uh submitted uh for the big the

a lot of that cost is from that january event it's been submitted to fema and as you and i uh recently discussed and i think i discussed with some other counselors as well the even though we submitted for that months ago shortly after it happened that was the the news item that very recently came across that the governor had declared that state of emergency which released those funds so i believe

we put in for what six hundred thousand dollars is that uh about 585 600 000 um yeah and i believe that's supposed to be a 75 reimbursement yes 75 yeah i said so my my hope is that that will mitigate some of that offset some of that um i only have one thing on revenues where the heck did i see it let me see on the marijuana um the three percent recreation we're only at 54

i find that low i don't see any lacking of people purchasing marijuana this is where i see that this is where i alluded to about the timing the marijuana the three facilities that you have in in fall river so far uh you you a couple of them two of them are paying on a monthly basis one's paying on a quarterly basis we just got in some payments this past probably was either friday or monday uh and

there's some glitches in the timing of the revenue coming in that's why i was telling you that some of this stuff i have an issue with because of the timing and we've involved corporate council to look at one of the contracts and change it we're hoping to monthly so that we can get a steadier stream of income coming in on the marijuana as you bring on more facilities so they're all operating on the same

you know the same monthly geared in the revenues because those are the ones that scare you your budget what you think is a conservative number and then all of a sudden you start to look in may and june get critical because it's a timing issue these these revenues need to come in on time the amount's right it's just a matter of bringing them in at the right timing and the other thing i need to comment on

is over time overtime in fall river needs controls this is a budgetary item i don't care what department it is they need controls and that's whether it applies to the department of community maintenance or police or any of them they're all alike they need some type of separate controls on them where there's periodic meetings with the with the heads of the departments to manage the overtime

because it'll kill you at the end of the year all of a sudden you'll find out you owe a ton of money you know the year over so these are areas that you know need control yeah i agree uh with that i yield thank you thank you anything further from the council nope what's that most um the clerk has gone and got the resolution that was filed by myself in uh september of 2021 when

the folks from attentivity drive first started emailing us that is in um i'd ask the city administrator director of financial services and the administrator of community utilities be invited to a meeting of committee on public works and transportation so um vice president dion you are the chair of that committee if you would um put that on on your next agenda we'll put on the next agenda thank you and madam clerk if

you would make sure that the folks on carl i don't know carlisa carlia and tiffany in that whole area are made aware of the meeting thank you and actually i would hope to have anderson street on there as well because it's a very similar uh situation and there was a motion to return by council kilby so i can say something before we turn absolutely on the um council agenda i believe it's uh items 19 and 20

it says minutes for the committee on finance from march 22nd and april 12th shouldn't that the minutes be approved during finance madam clerk no i don't know i got a call from yes we get messages all the time i can i can speak to that if you don't mind so so there was a decision that was just recently issued um from the division of open government regarding um that minutes should be approved within

the meeting that the minutes are for correct but then there was additional guidance that came out yesterday which was really strange that totally contradicted at least in my view i'm not criticizing the division open government but it did very clearly say in response to that same inquiry in fact the city council can elect to approve minutes for the committee on finance in its main meeting

or in the community finance and it doesn't matter i don't really know why the two contradictory opinions were issued but councilor pereira is absolutely right that there's a recent decision that seems to indicate that the minute should be accepted within the meeting that they're four uh but then it that position was seemingly reversed thank you jordan my counselor kilby seconded by

councillor raposo second all those in favor all right meeting adren three minute recess

do

my

city council meeting will now come to order madam clerk counselors kadeem here camara here dion here kilby lee here pelletier yeah pereira here proposal yep and president la la belabo here would everybody in the chamber please rise for a moment of silent prayer and remain standing for a salute to the flag i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the

republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all pursuant to the open meeting law any person may make an audio or video recording of this public meeting or may transmit the meeting through any medium attendees are therefore advised that such recordings or transmissions are being made whether perceived or unperceived by those president and are

deemed acknowledged and permissible madam clerk the first item before you is the mayor's request for the confirmation of ashley pyre's position of city auditor second second motion to confirm made by councillor pereira yep second invite counselor kilby any discussion all those in favor aye aye so voted congratulations congratulations

congratulations

glendale that's good

have the planning board recommending the acceptance of glendale street from north main to a dead end meadow clerk oh we have a motion to adopt maple council he'll be seconded by councillor pelletier um would it be appropriate for accepting accepting accept the communication and adopt the order for the plans yes motion made and seconded although any discussion all those in favor all right any opposed so voted

item number three is the police department's annual report motion accept place on file second motion acceptance place on file made by counselor kadeem seconded by council vice president dion any discussion all those in favor aye any opposed so voted committee on economic development and tourism at a meeting held on april 19th voted unanimously to recommend that the accompanying proposed resolution be

granted leave to withdraw this related to the um resolution to provide electrical cabinets to handle electrical needs at the gates of the city thank you to withdrawal council and seat seven the reason that we gave at least a withdrawal was because we've been working on it all the work has been done at the gates of the city so it's completed motion to adopt the prettiest report and

believed to withdraw made by councillor kilby second seconded by council vice president dion all those in favor aye opposed so voted committee on public works and transportation at a meeting held on april 19th voted unanimously to recommend that the accompanying final report be referred to the planning board this relates to the acceptance of small street extending from president ave to a

dead end that's good motion so made motion to refer the planning board motion referred to the planning board made by council vice president dion seconded invite counselor proposal any discussion all those in favor opposed so voted the committee on public works and transportation at a meeting held on april 19th voted to recommend that the accompanying order be adopted as amended

with council of pelletier abstaining and not voting this relates to in order um for the removal of curbing on behalf of michel aruda at 37 chicago street this was for the removal of 26 feet of curving motion to adopt as amended emotionally adopted as amended made by council prayer seconded by counselor kadeem any discussion okay good all those in favor all right any opposed counselor abstains

whereas the fair share amendment is a proposal to amend the massachusetts constitution creating an additional tax of four percent on the portion of a person's annual income that exceeds one million dollars and whereas the new revenue which may exceed two billion dollars per year would be spent on public education and the maintenance and repair of roads bridges and public transportation and whereas this would

help working families to ensure that massachusetts will have high quality schools roads bridges and public transportation now therefore be resolved that the fall river city council support the fair share amendment that will appear on the massachusetts state election scheduled for november 8th 2022. i want you to adopt the resolution second promotion adopt made by councillor kilby seconded by council

raposa would anybody like to any discussion either of the sponsors like to speak all those in favor aye any opposed so voted item number eight is the order granting permission to naomi source for the license to operate an auto repair shop at 10 30 dwelling storage second motion adopt made by council raposo seconded by councillor pereira any discussion nope all those in favor aye are you opposed so voted

item nine is the order granting permission to massachusetts electric for a new poll location at essex street motion to adopt so we're showing a dot made by council vice president dion seconded by councillor raposo any discussion all those in favor any opposed so voted item 10 is in order scheduling the hearing um for may 10th at 5 55 on behalf of mallory rosa for a second hand a new second-hand article store

motion adopt marshmallow job made by council kitty i'm seconded by counselor kelby any discussion all those in favor all right any opposed so voted item number 11 is the police chief's report on licenses on this report we have second hand renewals for echo atm and saint vincent de paul both are awaiting approval of ems and the fire department and for evita's thrift store has been denied by the collector so with the

council's permission these will await issuance until we have those approvals to the top condition on the uh office second did we do number 11 that this is number 11. oh i'm sorry so madam clerk there would be a motion to adopt pending approval of pending approvals made by councillor kilby seconded by council kadeem any discussion all those in favor aye opposed and then what are we doing with the one

that was rejected is that was that included for the approval of the collectors just that um provided they make sufficient they make payment to the collector okay um they are denied because they owe taxes so pending their payment or okay they satisfy the collector then we would issue the license okay um item number 12 are applications for the renewal of auto body shop licenses motion to adopt

emotional adopt made by council vice president dion seconded by council raposo any discussion all those in favor aye so voted item 13 are applications for auto repair shop licenses motion so made motion adopt me by counselor poso second second back councillor pereira any discussion all those in favor aye opposed so voted i have a number of claims motion to forward to corporation council

second motion afforded corporation council made by councillor posa seconded by councillor pereira any discussion all those in favor opposed so voted we have drain layer applications motion to adapt russian approved made by council pereira second second by council raposo any discussion all those in favor aye opposed so voted minutes of the planning board motion accept place on file second

motion accepted place on file made by council kadeem seconded by council reposo any discussion all those in favor opposed to voted you have the application for structures on or over a public way um on behalf of the board of health motion to accept motion approved made by counselor poso seconded by council vice president dion any discussion all those in favor opposed still voted motion to take items 18 to 22 second

motion to take items 18 to 22 together after a reading made by counselor kadeem seconded by councillor raposo all those in favor we have minutes of the city council public hearings held on april 12th committee on finance held on march 22nd and april 12th joint meeting of the city council and school committee held on april 7th and the regular meeting of the city council held on march 27th motion total

motion approved made by council vice president dion second and by council raposo all those in favor opposed so voted the committee on finance at a meeting held on april 26 voted unanimously to recommend that the accompanying budgets be referred to the full council for action this is the um fy 23 budgets for water and sewer divisions by councillor kilby saying that by council pereira any discussion

all those in favor aye aye madam clerk do you need a roll call we need a role i would suggest that you do a roll call is it the council's wish to take them individually water and then sewer all together you can take them together together so we have the water enterprise fund in the amount of 14 million 289 038 and the sewer enterprise fund in the amount of 26 million 603 402

and emotion would be to adopt counselors kadeem yes camara dion no kilby yes lee no pelletier yes pereira yes raposo yes and president lovely yes margin

all those in favor

so

you