Fool Me Once, Shame on You Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me

Maybe you have read the front-page story on the ongoing Water Rate Advisory Committee and actually believe those who refuse to see, preferring blind allegiance to the ruling class.  A news article is quite different than an opinion piece such as this.  If you believe a front-page story is biased, I invite you to watch the 3-hour extravaganza of the last committee meeting as it is archived at the city website for all to see.  Everything reported occurred or was missing as was stated.

 Perhaps you weren’t here in the years leading up to either the 110% rate increase in 2014 or the tripling of the water rate with the first of four increases in 2019.  As stated in the initiative “Vote YES on Measure S to OVERTURN the City Council’s 330% water rate increase!  Your water rate has already gone up 80% last year and 50% this year. AND it will go up 20% next year and 7% the following year. Are you paying enough??”  For those of you who are math challenged, you don’t add up the percentage increases, you need to understand compounding. A dollar charge before the increase becomes $1.80 then is increased by 50% to $2.70, then by 20% to $3.24 and so on.

 This rate increase was rejected in November of 2020 because the citizens of Dixon who were in the water district voted to repeal these rates by 72% of the vote, mainly because pertinent questions were never answered.  While those running the city, including those on the council, continue to bleat that 72% voted to repeal the water rate increase because the citizens weren’t educated about the need is hogwash.

First and foremost, just as with these latest meetings of the committee, spending wastefully doesn’t seem to be a problem for those who enjoy throwing other people’s money around.  One of the reasons that rates had to be so high was because staff wanted to accomplish all of their projects immediately and fund it with long term bonds.  This can increase the cost through interest to triple what you would pay with cash.  Funny how the money being accumulated could have paid for at least one well if it had been collected to this point in time and the system is still limping along.

Remember when city engineer Joe Leach, mayor Steve Bird, councilman Pederson and others told you that $37 million worth of projects absolutely had to be done?  While that figure was still put out there during the introduction to this process, it was whittled down because the responsibility to put in a new well or wells was that of developers.  So why put that figure out there in the first place?

Next, we have an $18 million expense, which is just a guess by the way, for Chromium 6 treatment.  No member of staff from the city of Dixon was at the State Water Board meeting fighting the ridiculous scientifically challenged mandate to reduce its level in our drinking water.  The Solano County Taxpayers Association had to do the job for the city by being one of two groups withstanding suing the State Health Department and whose lawsuit was won.

Now we are only looking at financing about $11 million in projects.  Rather than funding these projects solely through another rate increase, expenses need to be examined in detail.  So why is finance director Kate Zawadski refusing to present detailed information on expenses when operating expenses are wildly fluctuating?  Why are they wildly fluctuating?

Zawadski said that city administrative overhead being charged to water enterprise projects was 76.19% of whatever the cost of a project is.  Her lame presentation included a list of positions whose salaries and benefits are paid by this amount.  What was unclear is whether every project is charged this amount or whether the cost allocation study determines what portion of these individuals’ salary is charged to the fund regardless of any project moving forward.  If you can’t even answer that, we have a problem, Houston.

Finally, after almost 8 years, city staff got around to calling a well rehabilitation artist, Johnny Mott from Swage Kings.  From the statements of Josh Hudson, it seems that Mott didn’t look at anything but was told the situation.  There are two wells which need to be replaced or repaired.  I only heard Hudson talking about one of them.

Interesting that at the end of the presentation by Hudson, he did say that Mott could put in a liner, but it would reduce flow and not address the sand infiltration.  I will be calling Mott to see if he has a solution for that as this was one of the questions posed long ago, the solution was called a sand separator.

The most important aspect of this was that, once again, the city chose not to have any outside participant party to the session with a provider who might have given a different direction.  Also, as this well is a backup well at this point and could be lined to make it part of the regular system at a substantially less cost than drilling another deeper and cleaner water source well, if you could do this with both problematic wells, you might be able to avoid replacing both wells saving millions.

Those running the advisory committee keep talking about transparency and looking at all the solutions.  It seems that the staff didn’t get the memo.  Staff continue down the path of denial, obfuscation, and wasting your water usage fees and money in some vein attempt to justify their existence and that of their salaries.

If you let me run this city for half a year for half of Lindley’s salary, I could solve every one of the city’s problems.  It takes someone who can think outside of the box.  It takes a little research.

And I am not talking about researching from where your next beer or cocktail is emanating …