Negotiating with Bay River

The Town of Oriental provides Bay River Metropolitan Sewer District with billing services. We include the sewer bill with our monthly water bill. The town collects the sewer payments and forwards the money to Bay River.

Interestingly enough, there appears to have never been a contract with Bay River to provide this service since the expiration of a non-renewable contract about 1995.

In 2008 the Town increased the monthly per customer fee that we charged Bay River for the service.

Bay River didn't like that. I wasn't pleased either, since a back of the envelope calculation indicated we still weren't charging enough to cover all our costs. How much are we losing? I think the figure is about two bits per water customer per month.

Almost a year ago, Bay River proposed that we sign a contract agreeing, among other provisions, to freeze our fee for five years.

Now there's a really bad idea.

Randy Cahoon, Bill Sage and I drafted proposed changes to the Bay River draft and the Town retained Ben Hollowell to represent us in the negotiations.

We still have no agreement. Bay River has rejected every one of the Town's proposals.

Someone needs to explain why the Town wants to continue negotiating for the privilege of losing money to Bay River.