YACK on:
The politics of Poo
Grant Sanders
No single political issue on this island has caused more drama in the past ten years than poo. More specifically, our Comprehensive Wastewater Management Plan

affectionately known by sewer wonks as the CWMP) and its myriad ramifications. Why? Because this stuff, folks, is expensive. And the big question always comes down to, "Who pays and how much?"

If you're a homeowner on Nantucket, you've likely noticed that your tax bill has increased lately. Some of you have seen increases in the neighborhood of 20-30 percent. That's a lot. But guess what. You ain't seen nothing yet, baby! Call up the town finance department and they'll tell you that the majority of costs associated with the new Surfside sewer plant and the rest of our wonderful CWMP have not even made it to our tax bills yet. We are talking about a total project in the neighborhood of $175 million - a conservative estimate. If the CWMP goes the way of most municipal projects, we are likely to see a total price tag well over $200 million. Divide that number by the 10,000 or so homes here and we have a total cost of about $20 thousand per dwelling. If you own more than one dwelling, you're probably doing the math right now and saying something like, "Oh, poo!" Only you may be substituting a different word in that exclamation.

Why do we need to spend so much money? The answer is clean water. Because we are an island, we have a single large underground source of water and protecting it is extremely important. But we've been building 200 to 300 homes a year for close to 15 years, many of which have septic systems and sooner or later those septic systems fail. My brother in law had to replace his 9-year-old septic system a few years ago and it cost him $20 thousand. (Hey, there's that number again! Spooky!) So you can see why hooking up to the sewers is attractive to a lot of homeowners. You can pay $20,000 every nine to 15 years to replace your septic system, or get on the sewer system and pay that same amount through your user fees or taxes and probably never have to worry about it again in your lifetime.

The poo really hits the fan when you get into the politics of the whole issue.

There are some people who want to develop a workable and useful sewer policy. The sewer wonks. The number and policy crunchers. These people were behind the establishment of the Sewer Advisory Committee and its umpteen recommendations to the Board of Selectmen this past December - the result of 29 meetings over five months of 2006. Then there are the Policy Squashers. They don't want to see any change in how we manage or pay for sewers. Right now, hooking into the sewers is rather cheap. New homes have had a free ride. Up until this past year, the fee to hook into the sewers was around $2,000, which, to most developers, is a sneeze. But the 200-300 homes built per year (the ones on sewer at least) have raised the volume of poo going through our treatment facility, and previous iterations of our fine elected government have sat on their hands and passed the cost of additional flow onto the next group of selectmen. You can see why the Policy Squashers want to keep people from studying this problem. Someone might figure out that the homes we are building have been getting a free ride and have caused most of the need to upgrade our plant. And someone might ask this additional growth to pay its fair share. And the Policy Squashers' constituents would not like that at all.

Happily, this year a majority of selectmen, led by Michael Kopko (a guy who does not own a home, and has never paid a property tax bill or a sewer user fee in his life) drafted the Nantucket Sewer Act. This act gives the town of Nantucket authority to manage wastewater treatment that was previously the power of the Commonwealth. And it passed handily at town meeting.

Of course, an overwhelming majority voice vote at town meeting did not keep the Policy Squashers from rallying a small group of detractors from attending last week's joint legislative committee meeting on Beacon Hill which heard testimony prior to making a recommendation on this home rule petition (a fancy name for a law that grants a local government the power to govern by the state) before it is voted upon by the state senate and house.

This delegation of Squashers was led by former selectman Mike Glowacki (who I hope runs for selectman again and wins because I don't get to write about him as much as I'd like anymore), and Nancy Wheatley, the self-proclaimed "sewer lady" and part-time lawyer, part-time water resource consultant and part-time soup chef at a local retail establishment. (Her soups, by the way, are amazingly delicious.) Glowacki and Wheatley spoke before the joint committee and gave essentially the same speech they gave at town meeting. They were backed by a minority on the Board of Selectmen, Patty Roggeveen and Brian Chadwick, who, as far as I can tell, have never suggested as much as a comma change in an effort to alter the wording of the Nantucket Sewer Act, but are working like crazy to squash it anyway. Last Monday, in a hastily scheduled meeting of the BOS which was not posted (oops!) they lost a vote by 3-2, which, if successful, would have pulled the board's support for the Sewer Act, despite its support by town meeting.

After hearing testimony for and against, the committee on Beacon Hill, in its infinite wisdom, or in its desire to spend a day or two on Nantucket in July, decided to continue the hearing here on Nantucket in the coming weeks. I hope everyone who pays a tax bill or a sewer fee attends and voices his or her informed opinion on this subject. Not as informed as you'd like to be? Go to www.yackon.com and join the Nantucket Sewer Act discussion. I've posted the text of the act, MA Senate Bill 2249, in the discussion forums and have given everyone an opportunity to voice their concerns with the act. So far, no one has taken me up on my offer.

You probably won't see Patty Roggeveen, Brian Chadwick, Mike Glowacki or Nancy Wheatley on YACKon.com parsing the Sewer Act or offering their suggestions for amending this legislation, despite the fact that they all have access to yackon.com and are all welcome to post there. That would mean that they would have to be a party to progress rather than process. And history has shown, Policy Squashers just don't do that kind of thing.

YACK on. I

Grant Sanders is the host of YACK, the Nantucket Online Community at www.yackon.com and he attended several sewer advisory committee meetings because he finds them quite entertaining. His views are his alone and do not reflect the editorial policy of The Nantucket Independent. Or his wife.