Sewer rates likely to increase...

There is a City Commission work session tonight on a number of items.  It's being held at 5:30 p.m. instead of the usual morning time perhaps to accommodate Commissioner McVoy's work obligations.  At least this way, more people will have an opportunity to hear and attend if they wish.  Click here for full back-up material.

One of the items concerns rates for our regional sewer system.  Click title for link for the back-up for only that item.  This is the regional sewer system administered by the City of Lake Worth.  The same one that the city didn't bill our municipal customers for maintenance of the system and then sent dunning notices to them telling them to pay in full immediately.  Some bills were in the millions of dollars and came as a surprise to those municipalities.  Those same municipalities have little faith in the City of Lake Worth's accounting systems - any wonder why?

This issue is now in mediation.  It turns out that five of the eight customers are not paying until the matter is resolved or until a state auditor completes their work examining the city's accounting system as it relates to this matter.  That means that without increasing our fees, the fund will run out of money by 2013 to sustain the system.  The Town of Palm Beach and Palm Beach State College will also face rate increases since they are the ones, along with Lake Worth, that continue to pay.

All this is bad enough a situation, but it also suffers from a misinterpretation on the part of the City Manager.  This is her conclusion as part of the back-up memo - the highlighting is hers.

What the public wants is to have reliance on the city's accounting systems.  I do not perceive there are those that don't want the city to collect the money it is owed.  The poor way that the whole matter has been handled by the city contributed to the adversarial nature of this dispute.  A lack of transparency and cooperation were the hallmarks of the way the city dealt with this matter.

In the end, we are paying more due to our past - and current? - incompetence.