Saugus trailer parks won’t be getting free water meters

SAUGUS – The residents of the Saugus Mobile Home Park at 846 Broadway won’t be getting free water meters anytime soon and may not see their bills go down until next year.Environmental attorney Kristina Engberg told the board Tuesday that it would essentially be illegal for the town to pay to install meters at the Route 1 mobile home park.”It could be done but it couldn’t be paid for by the town,” she said.The board thought it might have found a resolution to the park’s water/sewer bills, which skyrocketed to more than $75,000 when town officials rearranged the payment structure. Officials tweaked the payment plan with the aim of giving low-end users a break, but because all 71 trailers in the park are metered through one meter, it put the park in a high-end user category.Engberg also told the board she looked at 25 other communities to see how they handled water/sewer bills and it turns out roughly half use a tiered structure just as Saugus does. About half the communities also use a single rate that applies to both high-end and low-end users, leaving just a small handful of communities that use a residential versus commercial rate.Selectman Michael Kelleher, who has been spearheading the move to rectify the bills, suggested that the board change the rates back to where they were retroactively. He said he hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but he believes the board has a responsibility to reset the rates to prevent disenfranchising a particular group of residents.Selectman Steve Castinetti said that was all well and good, but he reminded his colleagues that any rate change would likely affect everyone because the shortfall would have to be made up.But Kelleher argued that the $500,000 surplus gained from the rate change is the result of false inflation because the board didn’t expect to reap that kind of cash from the rate change.Chairman Donald Wong said he wanted to take appropriate steps, but didn’t want to do anything rash that would have them back at the table six months from now.Kelleher agreed, but reminded Wong that some residents who couldn’t pay their rent due to the $80 increase in their bill were now facing eviction.Castinetti suggested the board get together with members of Town Meeting, which controls the water rates.Kelleher asked Wong to contact Town Moderator Robert Long to see if Long could call for the reformation of the initial group that looked at the water rates last spring.