Following what seemed to be a deliberately confusing presentation at the citizens forum on February 23, 2010 by the Town Manager, CCT analyzed his presentation and confirmed our initial impression that he had failed entirely to tell taxpayers how much his centralized sewer plan would cost taxpayers.

The Town Manager has never given taxpayers realistic projections of what this needlessly expensive centralized sewer project will cost them. This presentation was all about how town accounting can be used to make more spending look like less.

What's the reason for this project? The motivation is to rid Chatham's coastal waters of the excess nitrogen that is blamed for unhealthy waters. While there are much less expensive ways to do this, the Town Manager and the Director of Health & Environment chose a centralized sewer system recommended by its consultant Stearns & Wheler, which is an expert in, guess what? Big City centralized sewer systems.

Taking into account the few new pieces of information the Town Manager supplied, CCT has developed and presents below a simple chart that provides the needed information to taxpayers on what this centralized sewer system will cost them.

The numbers really aren't complicated, though the Town Manager tried to make them appear so. There is construction estimated in 2007 numbers (as if all the work was done in one day) at $210 million and $30 million to pay for the operations during construction of this massively intrusive sewer project over a 20-year period.

Money is borrowed from the state for 20 or 30 years. The town has chosen 30 years for which the interest rate is about 2.83%, not 2% as shown in the Town Manager's charts. Connection costs for those forced to connect average $6,500, using town officials' estimate. About two-thirds of the town's properties will be forced to connect, some 4,386 properties. After the construction period annual maintenance charges of $400 will be levied on those connected. All numbers are adjusted for inflation at 3% a year. Voila! The numbers:

Why 20-year costs? Well, we all think or hope we'll live for this period. Also, the Director of Health & Environment told the Cape Cod Times in December that over a 20-year period a taxpayer getting sewered would only pay $175 a year on average or $3,500 for the 20 years.
Since the connection charge average cost is $6,500, his number is ridiculous as well as false. Our chart also identifies the total costs to taxpayers with various assessments over the 50 years of financing.

A copy of the spreadsheet from which this table was derived can be viewed by clicking on the link below:

CCT Property Taxpayer Cost Analysis FXM 03-14-2010.pdf

Cleaning up Chatham's coastal waters can be done for far less money than with the big city sewer the Town Manager and the Director of Health & Environment have been advocating.

These other ways are endorsed by national and state environmental organizations as better for the environment. They cause far less disruption to community life. They don't disturb and drain the water table as the centralized sewer does. They deliver results in far less time. They will not overload Cockle Cove Creek, turning it into an open ditch flooded with treated wastewater. With neighborhood cluster systems, Chatham won't become the Sewer Hub for the Lower Cape, as the Director of Health & Environment rhapsodically envisioned at a recent selectmen's meeting.

What's best for the environment and best for the taxpayer is not being done.

The Town Manager's plan wastes hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money with the hugely expensive centralized sewer plan that many taxpayers are rejecting in Falmouth, Mashpee and Orleans. Will the selectmen save the taxpayers or commit them to decades of unnecessary property taxpayer costs?

The Town Manager plan will cost close to half a billion dollars. Shouldn't everyone want to see if cleaning up the coastal bays of Chatham can be done for half the cost? Apparently everyone does except for the Town Manager, the Director of Health & Environment and the Selectmen and their usual allies.

The selectmen have closed down all discussion of their hugely expensive sewer project at selectmen's meetings. This Gulag-like denial of free speech is unprecedented in Chatham's history, as far as we know. Those who support what the selectmen want to hear are given unlimited talk time. Mention cheaper alternatives to clean up Chatham waters and the selectmen chairman gavels the speaker into silence.

The selectmen have denied taxpayers access to the town's television channel so they can inform citizens of the environmentally better and less expensive choices that taxpayers have. The selectmen need to abandon their devotion to yesterday's technology and open their eyes to what modern methods can do for the environment and the taxpayer's pocketbook. What blinds them?

A fully informed town meeting should vote on a final plan before it is implemented. However, it appears that the selectmen intend to deny taxpayers that vote as they are now denying them the opportunity to speak out at selectmen's meetings for less expensive alternatives that are environmentally superior.

The responsibility for this wasteful spending, therefore, will rest solely on their shoulders after the Town Manager moves on to his next assignment. Ten years is more than enough for someone in that position.

Town officials are fighting to spend taxpayer money on a project they like but refuse to tell citizens why they haven't tried harder to look at far cheaper alternatives and why they are rushing to start construction when there is no urgency. Some taxpayers have concluded that the Town Manager wants to present taxpayers with a fait accompli, that is, to move the project so far along there will be no turning back or shifting to less costly alternatives.

The big unanswered question is why they are so uninterested in looking into ways of saving taxpayer money. The selectmen have a fiduciary duty to spend taxpayer money wisely and they are not discharging that duty. But can they buck the Town Manager?