Saugus board wrestles with fallout from I&I judgment

SAUGUS – The town was hit with a $758,000 judgment last week and this week the Selectmen, as sewer commissioners, will have to decide what to do about it.The Board will meet tonight at 7 p.m. in Town Hall to discuss whether to appeal the settlement handed to four developers who sued the town over its Inflow and Infiltration fee. The builders called the fee an unlawful tax and won.While Selectman Stephen Horlick said he wants to review the facts of the judgment and the potential cost to the town before he makes a decision, his colleague Michael Kelleher said he is ready to appeal.The lawsuit was the result of an inflow and infiltration fee imposed on all builders – commercial as well as the homeowner who just wanted to build an addition. It was the result of a 2005 Department of Environmental Protection-mandated consent order forcing the town to clean up its sewer system.On the advice of DEP, the town started a sewer bank requiring builders to remove 10 gallons of wastewater from the sewer system for every gallon they planned to add. The cost rounded out to $3,300 per bedroom.The DEP, however, also set benchmarks. Once the town removed a certain number of gallons it could lower the ratio, thus lessening the financial impact on developers. But the benchmarks came and went long before the board lowered the ratio to 6-1 and finally, just this past January, to 4-1.Kelleher said initially the judgment came as no surprise. He long argued that he was afraid the board’s refusal to lower the ratio would come back to bite them.However, he said he is surprised by the amount of the judgment, which seems to include the entire cost of inflow and infiltration fee.”I disagree with that,” he said. “I was always worried that we would have to return something but not everything. They have to pay something. I think they’ve overstated the judgment by at least 40 percent.”If the town is forced to pay back the whole fee for each of the four developers, Kelleher said that would relieve them of having to pay anything at all, which is unfair since the ratio was eventually lowered.Unlike Kelleher, Horlick said the court judgment surprised him because the town was abiding by a DEP mandated consent order, so he assumed the town was in the right with charging the inflow and infiltration fee.”I’d like to read (the judgment) – we’ll meet and weigh the options,” he said. “We went by a government agency recommendation so I don’t know what this all means.”