Both cities exchange harsh criticisms

By Gretchen Sauerman

Sauerman@hometownnewsol.com

As the water dispute between Melbourne and West Melbourne enters its third year, signs of a resolution are nowhere in sight.

Melbourne City Council members spent two hours last week discussing the issue with input from special counsel Thomas Cloud, engineering consultant Gerald Hartman and city staff members.

Council members listened to their experts July 9 as they flipped through more than 100 pages of documentation.

Melbourne water customers are "subsidizing" West Melbourne customers, said Mr. Hartman.

To prove his point, Mr. Hartman said that Melbourne receives $1,340 in impact fees for utility service when a new house is built in Melbourne, but only receives $1,072 when a new house is built in West Melbourne.

In a letter responding to some of the assertions made by Mr. Hartman, West Melbourne city manager David Reynal said the argument was "overly simplistic."

"It ignores the fact that (Melbourne does not) maintain waterlines, meters, read and bill accounts (for West Melbourne customers)," he said. "We are a wholesale customer, without the wholesale rate."

Residents in most municipalities receiving water from Melbourne are retail customers. That is, Melbourne handles all of the individual billings and owns and maintains all the water distribution lines.

Melbourne does not maintain the pipes or bill individual customers in West Melbourne, instead supplying water through a series of large interconnections between the two cities' water systems.

Since the beginning of the dispute, Melbourne has argued that West Melbourne's system is inadequate to properly supply all of its residential customers.

During the July 9 meeting, Mr. Hartman said "master meters were 600 percent-oversized" at the interconnection points between the cities.

The large meters were being used to measure water flow between the two cities, "because of (West Melbourne's) inadequacies," he said.

The oversized meters don't accurately measure low water flow, meaning West Melbourne is not paying for all the water it uses, Mr. Hartman said, a conclusion Mr. Reynal disputes.

Mr. Reynal said the discussion ignores three important facts: that developers and engineers had worked together over the years to put in appropriate meters, that Melbourne had approved the size and location of each master meter, and that the master meters are capable of reading low flows.

"Compound meters have small meter components which are specifically designed for low flows," he said.

Mr. Cloud and Mr. Hartman also addressed a proposal West Melbourne drafted in March.

After attacking the proposal line-by-line, Mr. Hartman recommended the City Council reject the West Melbourne proposal.

By unanimous vote, the City Council agreed to the recommendation, although the vote was non-binding because the meeting was advertised as a workshop where no official council action can occur.

In response, Mr. Reynal said he was puzzled by the action since that proposal had been rejected already at the staff level, although he said every item was "subject to negotiation."

He also questioned the motivation behind the authors of the study leaving out important details, such as saying West Melbourne had not held up its end of the deal by failing to construct a waterline along Hollywood Boulevard, when it was well known that the project is under contract and that pre-construction meetings had already commenced.

West Melbourne council member Stephany Eley, who was in the audience during the Melbourne presentation, said she questioned the report "as a scientist."

"For a professional engineer to produce a document that biased was astonishing," said Ms. Eley. "You do not skew information."

She called the report "bad science" and filled with "huge holes."

After Mr. Hartman finished his report, deputy city manager Howard Ralls discussed a recent move by West Melbourne to change the way water capacity is determined for West Melbourne developers.

Currently, West Melbourne developers need permission, in the form of a concurrency certificate, from Melbourne before work can begin on a new project.

In granting that concurrency, Melbourne is agreeing that there is enough water and available infrastructure to deliver that water to a new development.

In May, West Melbourne's council authorized planning director Christy Fischer to petition the state to take Melbourne out of the process.

Mr. Ralls said Melbourne opposed the move for several reasons.

In a July 1 letter to the state's Department of Community Affairs, Melbourne city manager Jack Schluckebier raised five objections to the plan.

By removing Melbourne from the concurrency process, the city would not be able to adequately plan future demands and adjust plans for any capital improvements at the water plant.

"We are going to continue to object," said Mr. Schluckebier.

Furthermore, West Melbourne has no way of knowing how much water capacity is already reserved, Mr. Ralls said.

If West Melbourne initiated the change to prevent Melbourne from denying concurrency, the move is unnecessary, he said.

"We did not deny any applications for concurrency," said Mr. Ralls.

That's a point Mr. Reynal vehemently refutes.

"I have a copy of Microtel (Inn and Suite's) application that they did deny," said Mr. Reynal. "Further, most of the time, Melbourne has simply delayed their responses unreasonably, (which is) just as deadly to developers as a 'no.'"