Board delays RFP, cuts taxes

SEELEY LAKE – At their April 21 meeting, the Seeley Lake Sewer District Board plans to put out a Request for Proposals (RFP) but delayed when they would be due. They also voted to expend money from the District’s reserves for much of next year’s budget to reduce the burden on taxpayers for a year.

District Manager Bill Decker reported that there were two replies to the District’s Request for Qualifications (RFQ) that came in on time with the required number of copies, one that came in on time but was missing the number of copies and another that came a day later. Decker said in his opinion all four had excellent qualifications and he suggested that the Board consider all four moving forward.

Decker presented the Board with a RFQ scoring matrix. Director Pat Goodover questioned if they wanted to narrow it down to one or two or send all of them the RFP. President Tom Morris said he felt that as long as they were qualified it would be good to send them all RFP and then narrow it down based on their proposals.

Decker agreed and felt they would get a wide range of proposals from the four companies but suggested that the Board go ahead and score them. The Board plans to score them over the next month.

Morris motioned to have Decker contact each of the companies and request proposals from them.

Director Cheri Thompson argued that they should wait to request proposals until the District could put together all the pollution testing data including testing on the lake that is scheduled this June. Goodover countered that even if they put out a RFQ now, none of these companies would have a proposal ready for several months.

Thompson said if she had to make a decision based on the current testing data she would lop off parts of the District like Dog Town, for example, because there is not one bit of data that exists showing Dog Town is contributing to the contamination.

“In reality it looks like there’s a little teeny piece in the main part of town that is a problem,” said Thompson.

Morris said that if they wanted to start changing boundaries they’d be back at square one and his motion was to send out the RFP based on the existing boundaries.

Thompson said she felt like one of the problems in the past was that the Board tried to move forward with a project without all the data to back it up.

Morris amended his motion to have Decker contact each of the companies and request proposals to be due no sooner than six months from now.

Decker objected to the new motion because he didn’t think a couple months of testing would change anything after 25 years of testing. He questioned if the companies would take them serious if they asked for proposals but told them they couldn’t start working on them for six months.

The motion passed with Morris, Goodover and Director Jason Gilpin voting in favor and Thompson opposing.

For next year’s budget, Morris proposed holding $32,000 in reserve and spending down the rest of the current reserve to cover the District’s operation next year.

The District has a large reserve partially due to not spending as much on several line items from the current year’s budget. For instance, $38,400 was budgeted for a manager but since a manager was not hired for six months and is working fewer hours only around $800 has been spent. Other items like the $25,000 for new monitoring wells will also be carried forward.

The proposed budget would have the District spending approximately $128,000 but use $95,000 from the reserve and only put $33,000 on the taxpayer for this year.

Thompson suggested they add funding to public relations and round the burden on taxpayers to $40,000. The Board agreed.

This would be a large reduction in taxes collected since the current year’s tax assessment is approximately three times that amount. This reduction would be for only one year and will likely go back up next year as the reserves are exhausted.

The Board voted to budget for $40,000 assessed to the taxpayers and use the reserves for the remaining District expenses for next fiscal year.

The Board did not discuss how this year’s assessment would be spread amongst the taxpayers at this meeting. That decision will be made at a future meeting. Last year they used the equal assessment method.

The next Board meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m., Thursday, May 19. The agenda and information on how to participate will be posted on the District’s website seeleysewer.org