The Raynham Channel

Sewer Commission 11/12/2025

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(Episode Description is AI generated and may be errors in accuracy)

A quiet sewer system hides a lot of moving parts. We pull back the curtain on a month of fixes, planning, and hard numbers: five new hookups, jetting stubborn mains, and the mystery of a foaming supermarket wet well that kept pumps from priming until crews dosed anti-foam and fished out shrink-wrap-like debris. It’s a small drama with big implications—what flows into a station determines what fails, what it costs, and how quickly the team can restore service.

From there, we move into long-horizon work. The Route 44 control upgrade cleared submittals and the off-site control panel build is underway, with mobilization slated for early January when the last VFD arrives. On the streets, Mill Street paving wrapped, Elm Street East cleaning continues, and a future Pine Street culvert replacement will reroute a sewer main for resiliency. We also prep for a special town meeting with three sewer articles and a correction transfer, while subdivision acceptances trigger careful easement reviews to ensure the town only takes on assets with clear rights and obligations. Even housing policy enters the chat, as ongoing 40B hearings intersect with infrastructure planning in a town ranked among the state’s leaders in subsidized housing share.

Then the ledger opens. A final payment closes a decades-long IMA obligation, a quarterly treatment bill lands with an overcharge credit after staff challenged unrelated costs, and we frame the FY27 budget at $3.184 million, a 2.5 percent rise. Health insurance, pensions, and Taunton treatment charges are the swing factors, which is why we’ve been building stabilization and earmarked reserves to absorb the eventual hit from regional plant upgrades. We lay out four rate options—from no change to a $24 annual increase—showing how each affects revenue, reserves, and the ability to handle late collections without risking service. It’s a clear look at what reliable wastewater service truly costs and how to fund it responsibly.

If you value transparent infrastructure talk and want a say in how we fund essential services, tune in and share your take. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: which rate path best balances fairness and reliability?

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SPEAKER_02:

Good evening and welcome to the Border Sewer Commission's monthly meeting on Wednesday, November twelfth, because it should be tomorrow, but tomorrow I would be sitting here alone. Approval of the minutes from the last meeting, which was the no uh the October 9th. Have you had a chance to propose that, Mr. Kellogg? I have, and I would make the make make the motion that we accept as written. I will second that. And seeing Mr. Pickle is not available tonight, he's not voting. So all those in favor? Aye. Aye. The vote is 2-0. Moved by Cal Hurst, seconded by the chair, Mr. Battencourt. Correspondence. You have none. Come on. Superintendent's report. We do have one of them. Getting towards the end of the calendar year, it gets thinner. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Than a so on the Department of Operations again, November 12, 2025. We have had five connections to the sewer system since our last meeting. The guys have been busy with leaf cleanup at the pumping stations. Typical of this time of year, it's a losing battle. We clean the stations one day, the next day there's no one might get touched them. Well, that's okay. Right, keeps them busy. We did receive a couple trouble calls once again from the market basket pump station with the ongoing problems we were having there from our last meeting. As a result of that, we did have the wet wall cleaned up with a back of the truck. There was some debris frowned in there related to the market basket operations. Again, excessive amounts of soap suds. But uh the debris we were finding in there, uh we were finding like a big strip of what looked like possibly shrink wrap or maybe even uh clear you know Reddit's wrap or something like that. But uh told them if you could try and not sure how they're getting them down to the toilets or where they're coming from in there, but you know, told them if you can keep an eye out and try and prevent that from happening. Um wood, we have not had coil since we did that. Uh the guys have finished up easement clearing for the season, barren any major storms resulting in down trees. Um the crew has uh recently been performing some annual maintenance, including oil changes and wavering to impeller adjustments on a few of the pump stations. Uh, the new uh truck we ordered back in May that's expected to arrive early December. So we're good to see that. Uh the department's vehicle inspections uh are due for stickers. That's scheduled for November 26th. Sean's been busy with uh pre-inspecting the vehicles, two trucks receiving new tires, and two trucks requiring wheel bearing replacement, and one more truck will be getting some new brake lines. Uh, that should be happening next week. Uh, Route 44 control project. The submittals for all major components have been reviewed and approved. The next step for the contractor is building of the new control panel. This will be done off-site and when completed, delivered to the pump of station to begin installation. The contractor is looking to mobilize the week of January 5th at the station to do that work. Um they are still awaiting one VFD control, which is expected to uh to be received at the end of December. Special time meeting warrant. Uh, this meeting will be uh next November, I'm sorry, next Monday, November 17th, 2025, starting at 7 p.m. I do have some warrants here for you for warm. Thank you. And you'll see that um we have three articles as discussed last meeting. Um our art our our articles, sewer department articles being 21, 22, 23. Uh there is another article number eight uh related to the sewer department is submitted by the uh select board, and that was a sixty dollar sixty thousand dollar transfer uh from the town to the sewer.

SPEAKER_00:

That's because they they failed to do it last year. Correct.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh radiant preserved east in uh Bassett Knoll or Bay Berry Road subdivision. The uh developer of these two subdivisions is is requesting and working toward roadway in subdivision acceptance. Uh, this will be an article on the water at a special town meeting. Uh, town council will be reviewing the easement documents for acceptance of the roadways and easements. Um, I'm scheduled to go meet over at uh town council's office tomorrow for to discuss um the sewer easements. Uh there may be some controversy on this one at the town meeting. Um, planning board, a couple planning board members uh voted not to remake it recommended for the warrant, um thinking that the deed documents need to be reviewed prior to town meeting, but if you read the bylaws, it's after. So the road it needs to be accepted, and then after that, the developer provides the deeds, and then the town council will uh review them after that. So I'm gonna get some hear a little bit of that going on at the meeting. Taunton invoices. Uh, I have um the bill at the IMA bill for the city of Taunton to process um this week. Uh this bill is in the amount of 71,400 and is the final payment on a 20-year fee schedule, which was part of the IMA. Do we have that fee schedule if you're interested? Kind of old losing now being the last payment.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02:

These schedules, of course, are subject to change. But this was a uh an agreement in the past, and we've made the final payment in 2006. I think that again. So it is uh there's no problem. But when you said the fee schedule, this is just a breakdown of the amount. The agreed amount was a million four plus interest, and uh it's all paid off. Uh when you said fee schedules, I said I I think the new ones will be coming up very, very shortly.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Um I also have the uh first quarter treatment bill for July, August, September. Uh this is in the amount of$137,199.21. Uh this amount does include a credit in the amount of$13,211.27. And this credit was due to the fact that Taunton was overcharging on the fourth quarter from last year, which I had questioned them on, and they looked into it and realized.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, so what happened is it's the same amount basically. Yeah, they gave you a 13 on a hundred and fifty, correct. And the new bill after the credit is one, so the bill is still 150, yeah. Yeah, so you're gonna need this second bill a little more clarified because you corrected the first bill already. Right, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So they okay, so they because that was already paid, they're giving us a credit on this on this bill here. Yes, yeah. Is that your catch or yeah. I I questioned them well why why it seemed to be so much higher. Um, and Taunton had uh suggested that they had had a uh brought on a new pumping station over North Walker Street, which we have nothing to do with North Walker Street. So um, you know, I mentioned that we're only supposed to be paying for uh carbon sewer, wherever Rainham is running through, and I guess they uh looked at that and realized that was the case. So catch by you and nice try by them, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Well the bill that just came in again is uh the first bill was an obvious this this new bill of 137 is really the same price. Yeah, and that new bill should be clarified also that we're not getting it from the connection to Dyton instead.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh Ringham Highway Department Project, sidewalk and driveway inference paving was completed today on Mill Street. Uh I believe the next major highway department project that the sewer department will be involved in will be uh during the replacement of the Pine Street culvert. That sewer main over there presently runs over the existing culvert, uh, with the new design will be running along the side of it, so similar to what they did over on Mill Street. Not sure when that will take place. Um I think it's still in the design for that. With the main hole adjustment work being finished on Mill Street, we had sewer sanitation jet wash on the back of the sewer main. That work was completed last week. Uh the sewer main on Elm Street East was also cleaned, although not completed, and that work will be uh it's scheduled to be continued tomorrow and hopefully uh completed tomorrow. Rightway uh cross and 40B project, the Mass DOT road opening permit for this project has been approved. I have not heard from the installer regarding the schedule of the work. That window, I believe, may be closing unless DOT allows work beyond the typical November 15th cutoff. So we may not be seeing anything being done to that till next spring. Riverfront Radium 40B project. I remember on November 4th, I testified in the appeals hearing for this 40B project. This hearing was with the Executive Office of Housing in Livable Communities. Uh, this was a Zoom-type hearing held at the town council's office. Additional hearings are to continue, uh, so no decision has been made. As you may know, uh the town is currently at 15.31% subsidized housing inventory. We are the highest in Bristol County, um, and amongst the top eight in the entire state. And you see the top eight, the Boston, Bedford, Holyoke, Equinar, which is actually on Martha's Vineyard. I was surprised to find out. Uh, Chelsea, Springfield, Berlin, and then Rainham. So we are amongst the top eight in the state.

SPEAKER_02:

It's easy if you only have a hundred living rights and seventeen of them happen to be affordable.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. I actually have the list if you were interested in seeing that. I am that is the subsidized list. Get to that later. Uh the pictures on the bottom. I almost left them out, but Joe Pickle wasn't here, he's the one that likes them. But uh, anyways, that's the market basket. What we were finding in the uh in the wet well, you can see that piece of uh, I believe shrink wrap probably probably from the skin. Packaging or something. Um and then the right side doesn't that picture doesn't really show what's really happening there. The real picture that that water in there is pure white, and the water coming out of the pipe on the left is is all white from the soap coming in. Um so what we have to remedy that um the pumps will not pump soap suds, they get air bubbles. Um so we have to uh they make a product for actually for um hot tubs to remove air bubbles, I guess. And uh we have to use that. We'll put some of that in there and it immediately gets rid of the air bubbles and the pump will prime up. So when we have a problem, we dose dose it with that and we can get the pump running again. But the uh the objective is to try and get them to eliminate that. We we never really had that problem with them before, occasionally maybe once in a while. So it's been pretty uh pretty constant recently over there. That's all I've got to get for us to have any questions. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay. Um have a question. Uh next new business is uh tie and bond. Rehab bidding contract.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep, so this is for uh one of the articles on the warrant, uh, which is for the manual planning rehab. Yes. Um, and this would be asking for me to have time bond uh perform the the bidding services.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I uh my uh my guess is that we're not gonna have any trouble with the article, right? And um, but it isn't till Monday, so I have no problem with authorizing you to uh sign that on Tuesday, Tuesday the 18th, after it's approved. Uh we could do it because by the time the work had done it would be there. Okay. But uh I don't wait. It's just the concept of we didn't commit money before we were authorized to do it. You were authorized to go through the process and we put money aside for it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so this would be um if the end of a win it gets approved at the town meeting. After that, I would have the authorization to sign up. Yeah, yeah. You want to motion aye or do you need one?

SPEAKER_02:

Uh that's normal procedure. Okay. You know, if uh if if it wasn't because the money is being transferred from retained earnings to this to be spent specifically for this, you he'd be just coming in and talking about to do that, we'd say, yeah, go ahead and go. So that's fine. Okay. And preliminary budget and sewer user rate discussion. For those of you who are awake and watching this somewhere along the line, this is what you call proactive. There's a gasp at home, I just proactive budgeting.

SPEAKER_01:

So um as a as a request from the chairman, Chairman Benton Court uh started working on the budget, uh, FY27 budget early this year. Um seeing that we know what the contract, the employment contracts were were going to entail, uh, we were able to start a little bit earlier. Um so we're getting to the meats at meat and potatoes rather than going down each line item like I typically do when we're actually ready to accept the budget. Um you will see on the bottom right um total budget amount for FY27. Again, kind of preliminary. We have um the retirement and pension and the health insurance indirect costs always come to play towards the end. But the total budget amount being uh$3,184,044. That is a 2.5% increase from last year. Last year's budget$3,106,364. You can look through it and see some of the changes that were done. Uh, monies were mainly just swapped around between light items uh throughout the budget. Um, as you can see, it's a lot went down and uh kind of transferred over to that uh uh sewer assessment fund. Uh some went down, most went down, and a couple went up. They were basically just a transfer from one account to another. But if you have any questions on that, um Jim and Bettencourt can explain a little more if you'd like.

SPEAKER_02:

It's called Transfer de Sewer Assessment. This isn't is the but this is the the bill we're gonna have to pay to the city on our 15.48 percent of the cost of the reconstruction and of their new um facility. And uh in the past we've been showing a half a million, and we're now showing 900,000. That's still a guesstimate, and it is um it's hard to get a number from them. I've spoken to people, and uh the people I need to talk to because they're the ones that are physically capable of giving an answer have not responded to tell us what we need to know. So as I as uh Rob and I explained at the finance committee when uh we went in uh on the special articles, uh we talked about the budget that we were working on, and uh they're aware of what what's happening. So uh we're just being proactive, getting a bit of an idea of what we're really gonna be faced with. There are two hits in the budget. One is the cost that the city of Taunton charges sewer users. That means everybody in the city of Taunton is going to get a new sewer bill, and we're gonna get a new sewer bill also. That's for the processing of our waste. And um uh we we've been carrying a half a million dollars, and uh I think that's going up 20 percent, so we uh put another 100,000 on it, and if you would just pay to the the bill that we just got of 152,000 with a credit of 13 because of a previous bill, well 150 times 4 was 600. So we're anticipating that going to it. The big numbers in this is really what Taunton is going to need from us. So we've been squirreling some of this money, as you can tell, and uh we put it into uh stabilization account, we put it into the Taunton account, uh, which we're going to do on the 17th. Um so we're facing it, and we're just uh uh this would we wouldn't be putting this budget together until sometime in January. But um I just had the superintendent sit down and do everything but labor because we couldn't be sure last year we couldn't estimate what the contracts were. But now that the contracts are in, he's able to put what it will be increased for the personnel. The variables always will continue to be health insurance and retirement pension amounts that we have to wait until the boys downtown. And the other one is the indirect charges that uh transferred to the general fund, our share of uh what it costs them to do the bookkeeping for us, etc. So even though uh we're talking about 3.184 million, it's only two and a half percent higher than last year. Even though we've got some real big numbers in there, we were able to trim dramatically uh a number of the accounts. And uh, you know, used to be fifteen thousand. Well, what did we spend last year? We spent 12.5, let's carry 13,000. And it uh it will vary again next year when we get a more definitive item with it. And unfortunately, because of uh this with this uh we've gone what four years with the same rate. We're gonna have to be looking at a an increase for revenue for the FY27 account. We've been able to hold it at what we have, and uh we just have to we just have to be able to raise the amount of money that we project we're gonna have to spend. It's an exercise, again, as I say that a little more debilitating than most budgets because we're trying to cover for uh a variable that we don't know. But because they have taken so much time, we have put money aside towards this. So we do have a cushion waiting when they do come out. And once we get the number and we make the final changes and everything, uh everything will be explained again, and uh you can see where uh we'll be able to hold the line. We can't hold the line on labor, we can't hold the line on retirement pension and insurance. That stuff, you know, if the if gasoline decides to go down to a buck and a half a gallon, we won't spend as much. But that's a dream.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, my rate schedule? Yes. Okay, so for the FY27 operating budget rate schedule, um again, um estimated budget$3,184,044. Um, that's that's bottom line. Um these calculations were using the uh the unit count, residential unit count from uh June billing, so that's$4,913 at that time, and uh commercial flow from January through December of last year. Um so if you look at the residential rate with no increase, so actually commercial rate as well, no increase, um, you will see we have a deficit of 29,621 to carry our new budget. Uh second line item down would be a$6 a year increase or 1.22%, which would add another 12 cents per thousand to the commercial rate. Uh while we do have a little bit of reserve, it's not enough. Uh$9,370 certainly wouldn't be enough of a reserve debt. Third one down is$12 per year, a dollar a dollar per month. Um that would raise uh$3,231,612, slight reserve of$47,568. Keeping in mind that we don't really collect all of our building at once when we send the bills out. We're usually some at sometimes$200,000 short on their billing cycle before we start to see it. The bottom uh example, that's a$24 a year increase on residential, 45 cents on commercial per thousand, that's a 4.88% increase. Um that brings in$3,308.008, uh, leaves us with a reserve of$123,964. So some that was some of the examples we have on the uh rate increases that we're we can look at. Um I'm thinking probably the uh$24 per year would give us uh enough in reserve to carry those uh unpaid bills. The last one? Yes.

SPEAKER_02:

The uh the note that uh uh uh Rob just gave us about collecting our bills at the end of June we had what was it, a hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars unpaid of that fiscal year's bills. Okay? And how do we how can you do that? It's because we have retained earnings, which is working capital, that uh absorbs that until we collect it. To be fiscally responsible and to abide by the guidelines and the responsibilities we have, we have to show the finance committee that we can generate enough revenue to cover the cost of operation. So that's what we're doing. There are some ordinary uh ordinary income pieces that are they're variable and it's can't be guaranteed. And when you do a budget for the government, they want to know, have you got the money? So we generate the revenue, we hopefully collect is eventually we collect it, maybe two years from now. Maybe once in a while I'll last the accountant down in town hall. Do we have any from two years ago, two cycles ago? And he may say, yeah, we got one and we got another one, but most of them are coming. So it's good that they're not long-term because they're paying interest on that. So that's one of the things that uh we're gonna have to do a little more definitive work on between now and January to get it. We this is a big head start. It's a comfortable thing knowing what we have and uh the reserves that we've set up with the uh stabilization and uh uh the goals that we have for stabilization and uh maintaining and uh retained earnings number uh will make this fiscally responsible and capable and uh to handle whatever comes down the road, down our way. Other than surprises, like uh not getting a bill for two years or three years, and then they're looking for three years payment or something like that.

SPEAKER_01:

One thing I'd like to bring to the board's attention is is uh Commissioner Bickel called me last night uh just asking what was gonna be on the agenda. Um he wanted me to make it known that he has some reserves on on uh some of this uh rate discussion. So um I told him we wouldn't be voting on it tonight, but then it was just gonna be a discussion.

SPEAKER_02:

So no, that's uh we don't do that until we wouldn't do that with just two of us. That was one as input. Yeah. Yeah. I'd want everybody on board that he'd have to be on the phone, but that the function tonight we wouldn't he wouldn't be able to hear us. Yeah. So. Just told the name of that, but you guys know he had some reserves on it. Yeah. So thank you for the effort and the work you did, Mr. Carey. It shows you've come along. Uh any old business? Yeah, none. No old business? No emergency business. No commission reports, public reform, press time being none. If that be the case, I would entertain a motion to adjourn for the purpose of doing administrative work and taking no further action. Put that in the form of a motion. Motion made by Mr. Kelleher. Second by Mr. Betancourt. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. We are adjourned at 6 30. See you next month.