NEW ALBANY —  

Let’s be clear about one thing right off the bat. I would not fault any city council member for calling “time out” when asked to increase the $5.04 per unit sewer rate by another $1.81. There’s nothing insignificant about that.

But when any council member tries to blind us from the facts with irrelevancies, personal grievances, and boogeymen, I call foul.

Council member Dan Coffey and his accomplices, seeing this newest responsibility as yet another opportunity to declare holy war on progress of any sort for New Albany, are finding dozens of ways of calling the kettle black. But these pots are doing nothing to shed light on this important topic.

As one local wag put it, Coffey and his desperate confederates are trying to declare war over whether or not 2 plus 2 equals 4. (By the way, 2 plus 2 does equal 4. That is not an opinion.)

And while the often-confused Coffey is always prone to channeling the rhetorical skills and factual mastery of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy, even he isn’t claiming that there is waste in the day-to-day operations of the sewer utility.

Oh, sure, he’ll sometimes declare that the city could fire the professional management and technical operations crews and run the utility itself and save $3 million a year, or $200,000 a year, or whatever number pops into his head when an audience he thinks gullibe is forced to listen to him. But no one seriously believes that operations and maintenance are at the root of this 2010 rate increase.

It’s the debt, plain and simple. And it’s not frivolously acquired debt. It’s not for discretionary projects. The projects being paid for are mandatory. The only silver lining to it is that New Albany is and will be years ahead of its municipal peers when these projects are completed. Someday, at least when it comes to sanitary sewers, we’ll be a model for other communities whose financial sacrifices for the environment are still to come.

As the city council prepares to lock in a new sewer rate for the next 6 years, the most important thing it could do is eliminate the EDIT subsidy of the sewers.

Indiana allows its cities to build and operate various utilities, like sanitary sewers and treatment plants. These municipal utilities are to be run like businesses, but without a profit and payout to the city that owns it. The rates for city residents can’t be so high as to create a windfall. But the rates can’t be so low that the utility must be bailed out by taxpayers.

In short, municipal utilities like our sewer operation must stand on their own without a government handout. The people who use the service must pay at a rate sufficient to cover all of the utility’s expenses plus a safety reserve. If money is borrowed for capital projects, the rate must cover the servicing of that debt, too.

New Albany does not follow that law. The city council has declared itself above the law several times in the past, so this is not news. But it is illegal.

In the past few years and again this year and next, the income tax payers of New Albany will help pay the bills of the largest users of the system. They will prop up the cash flow and profits of practically every commercial, retail, and industrial business on the system. And they’ll pay a portion of the bills of people who live outside the city and who pay no income tax to New Albany.

If we quit transferring taxpayer money to those folks and returned it to benefit New Albanians, what would that do to the overall sewer rate?

As it stands right now, taxpayers pay almost 50 cents for each 100 cubic feet used each month. A fast food restaurant outside the city was pretty happy to have New Albany taxpayers pay $277.20 of their sewer bill last month alone. A nearby residence paid $9 less because of our city’s council’s generosity with our tax money.

That’s one business and one household out of more than 16,000 ratepayer accounts. Those two little bits of “generosity” took $286 away from safer neighborhoods where New Albany taxpayers work, live and play.

Isn’t it time to tell City Council to quit giving our income taxes away just so they can play make believe with gullible constituents?

By adding 7 percent to the rate this year and next, and then rolling it back to just 4 percent in future years, we could reclaim that economic development income tax money and use it for common purposes and not to keep private bills lower.