| I find it very strange that not one citizen of Longmeadow, who is not a part of our government, has come forward in favor of our new water/sewer program. The only people who are pursuing this concept are the members of the Select Board, the Town Manager who first proposed this change and a few managers like Mike Wrabel and Paul Pasterczyk who report directly to the Town Manager. Not one letter to the editor or other articles supporting this fiasco. Not one complaint about the old system. The silence is deafening. One answer is that this drastic change in our water/sewer service was not needed or demanded by our citizens, but by the Town Manager. In her prior position in Hadley, she tried to get a similar system adopted, but failed. She told my wife Susie and me when we had coffee at Starbucks in September she would push to get this program in Longmeadow. There is no push by the public for this change. So why change? We were not having any problems with our water/sewer system so why go look for trouble? They claim we hadn't had a price increase in years, but why not just raise our rates to an acceptable level and move on? Why change a philosophy of our system? In conclusion, it seems that 16,000 citizens were fairly satisfied with our old water/sewer system. We basically need a price increase to keep our maintenance and personnel performing at acceptable levels. All we needed to do was a simple function of raising our rates to a level that "caught us up" to where we would have been had we raised rates as we should have. Simple! Why did we have to throw the baby out with the dirty water? Susie and Sam Altman Longmeadow |
