Water/Sewer Information

I attended the BOS meeting on Tuesday night and there was a Public Hearing section with regards to the water/sewer rates. The Board approved a rate increase for this year after a report from Toby Fedder, P.E. of Woodard & Curran and public comments. I posted on Facebook about this meeting and received a question regarding what benefits the town has seen after going with a private company to provide water/sewer services. I emailed Kevin Sweet about it and he provided this thorough answer, which I was given permission by him to share. I wanted to be sure to post here for those not on Facebook. I hope this helps shed some light on this utility. I certainly found it informative.

Hi Alannah,

Yes, thank you for joining us last night.  So this question has somewhat of a complex answer.  The decision to privatize something is not based solely on cost savings although that is usually a big factor.  The Town through a state stimulus grant and some local matching funds did a considerable upgrade to the plant resulting in modernization and electrical upgrades.  At that time about 7-years ago due to the complexity of this new investment the Town opted to hire a contracted “Plant Manager” and functioned under a hybrid of a contract plant manager and town employee operators.  This resulted in difficulties related to personnel management as a contractor could not properly supervise union town employees, etc.  In addition, there is a shortage of wastewater operators throughout the state and we were seeing turnover and extreme difficulty filling the position.  After we had an Operator go to a private company and another took a job in Concord we made the decision to privatize the entire operation and the one remaining employee was absorbed into an opening within the water/sewer division.  Due to the complexity of operating a WWTP this is often a privatized function of municipal government throughout the Country. 

The benefits for the Town:

-          Do not have to worry about hiring licensed operators and a plant manager

-          Overtime, vacation, sick coverage for a 24x7 operation are borne by the private company

-          Health insurance costs and retirement benefits are saved as well as Other Post Employment Benefit (OPEB) liability

-          Ongoing increased chemical costs are borne by private company

-          Daily sludge disposal and hauling increasing costs are borne by private company

-          Maintenance and replacement of 9,000 gallon tanker truck

-          Private company has bigger network of technical experts to call upon and regulatory insight

There is no doubt privatization of the WWTP has been a benefit to the Town and has saved us financially especially long-term.  One of the biggest benefits is we can predict our costs we know contractually through the duration of the Agreement what are expenses will be and can do forecast projections.  As a Town operation these costs are unknown due to employee Union agreement increases, disposal costs, chemical costs, etc.  Overall our budget for the WWTP operations was reduced and has been a cost savings.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Kevin