I want to commend you for tackling Oxford’s serious budget issues. For too long, they have not been addressed head-on.
As the Town Manager graph presented on March 24 shows, for some years funds from our water and sewer utility operations have been used to cover a shortfall in revenue on the operating side. Now we are discovering that revenue from utility operations does not cover the true cost of providing the service when a depreciation charge—sufficient to cover the eventual repair or replacement of a very expensive plant—is accounted for.
I believe that the Commissioners’ deliberations on resolving this issue do not go far enough. We should establish a separate Utilities Commission to oversee water and sewer operations, with an eye toward eventually creating a standalone, legally independent Utilities Authority.
We need to transition from a “one bucket” government, where all income and expenses come out of the same bucket, to a “two bucket” government where utility operations are completely separate from all other town government operations. Ratepayers must pay the full cost of providing the service.
Not doing so now leaves us open to falling back into the same morass down the road.
What is a really bad idea is proposing, now that we have discovered utility ratepayers are not paying the full cost, the subsidization of utility operations from general revenues. If Commissioners want to “soften the blow” of rate increases, they can do that without raiding general revenues. The big expense number in utility operations is depreciation—that’s a non-cash charge. Present utility operations are cash positive.
The suggestion that we disband the Oxford Police Department to save money to subsidize utility operations is particularly wrongheaded.
I have been clear regarding my belief in the importance of maintaining our own Oxford PD. It’s part of our town’s DNA. The list of benefits, both tangible and intangible, would fill several pages. I’ve enumerated many of them before and won’t go into them here. But I do want to see our Commissioners riding with the Oxford PD in next year’s Oxford Day parade, as they did this year—not the Sheriff.
The expense of a two-man department can be much less than proposed on March 24. We don’t need LEOPS, and we don’t need a new patrol vehicle. We don’t need to subsidize utility ratepayers at the cost of our own Oxford PD.
Once gone, the Oxford PD will be nearly impossible to reconstitute. The armory will be gone, the vehicles gone, and our most important resource in providing local knowledge and continuity, Sergeant Bobbick, will be gone.
I would be happy to serve on a search committee to find a new Chief who is qualified and willing to serve within our budget and without LEOPS.
I urge the Commissioners, as I suggested on March 24, not to make this decision unilaterally, but to place this question on the ballot.
Steve Tull
Oxford