VFW is right about its sewer bill

I refer to the Advertiser-News article of Aug. 13 indicating the local VFW's intention to challenge its $46,000 sewer hookup fee levied by the VTMUA, Vernon's sewer authority.

As a former VTMUA commissioner and former underwriter of municipal bonds, I side with Mr. Constantine's overall contention that the VFW's bills nay not fairly correspond to the VFW's actual utilization of the sewers. This problem exists to varying degrees throughout the entire VTMUA customers and is due to the VTMUA's early adoption of a rarely used, often dysfunctional and outdated billing method called EDUs, or "Equivalent Dwelling Units." This method has been around since the 1970s and these days is never used by regulated utilities and only selectively used by privatized MUAs.

While still a VTMUA commissioner in 2014, I prepared an internally circulated 22-page study of why the MUA should switch back to a usage-based system for billing purposes, which was successfully used by United Water for its sewer bills in Vernon for over 25 years. About 95 percent of the MUA's customers already have water meters, which could be used to determine usage and proxy hat their sewer bill should be. New customers could be provided water meters for as little as $175 a piece installed. In my study, I interviewed more than 20 experts ranging from BPU (Board of Public Utilities) directors to investment bankers who underwrite MUA bonds. This latter group sometimes referred to the term EDU as "Easily Distorted Utilization." The EDU system uses a completely arbitrary, non-statistical and, in my opinion, all-too-often inherently inaccurate means of determining what a sewer bill should be. It often bases a bill on the number of square feet in a building, number of bathrooms in a home, or even number of pews in a church, without regard to whether there is actual utilization justifying a specific EDU count.

For my study, Gov. Chris Christie's office provided me with a study done by a blue-ribbon panel of experts commissioned in 1995 by then-Gov. Christine Todd Whitman to study, among other things, whether EDU billing systems or usage-based systems based on water meters were more efficient and fairer to customers. The conclusion of this study was that "all-too-often EDU-based systems result in substantially lower sewer bills for large commercial customers and larger bills for small businesses and residential customers thus defeating the purpose of creating fairness in billing. The EDU system can sometimes be used to artificially establish lower bills for preferred customers to the detriment of others."

The Vernon MUA currently has the means to convert back to a usage-based system quite easily; it has the software and other means of doing so and an open offer from the BPU (which itself recommends water-usage based billing) to assist in the process pro bono. The VTMUA faces some very serious challenges in the coming years and has not been particularly successful in attracting new commercial customers so far. The EDU billing system is, in my opinion, a disincentive for new customers to hook up at all. I, therefore, encourage my former VTMUA colleagues to revisit this issue at their earliest.

Roy Tanfield
Vernon