Three Morrisville businesses will see their wastewater rates hiked by more than 100% in April.
The businesses, two breweries and one maple company, say they don’t know how they’ll adjust to accommodate the additional thousands in costs each year — but they’re also relieved to see that the rates below earlier proposals that had suggested hikes as high as 1,000%.
The change in rates follows a years-long fight between the local utility, Morrisville Water and Light, and the businesses: Lost Nation, Rock Art, and Butternut Mountain Farm.
The utility says the new rates will make the businesses pay their fair share for their disproportionate wastewater contributions. It says the town was essentially subsidizing the businesses by allowing them to pay any less in past years.
But the breweries contest that notion, saying the new rates are unreasonably high, and completely out of step with their actual contribution to the town’s wastewater levels.
“When I saw [the proposed rate], my jaw just hit the floor,” said Matt Nadeau, owner of Rock Art Brewery.
The problems for the brewers started in 2016, when the wastewater plant in town started seeing some concerning numbers.
The two key figures for the plant were its “flow,” or total volume of wastewater, and its “BOD,” which refers to the concentration of organic material in the wastewater. And when things are going well, the two figures are supposed to stay at about the same level.
But certain kinds of companies, like breweries, have higher BOD rates than typical households or businesses.
What the plant’s operators started noticing in 2016 was that while the flow was where it should be, around 50%, the town’s BOD levels were way too high, at just shy of 80%. That was especially concerning, because once the levels cross the 80% threshold, that automatically triggers alarm bells at the Agency of Natural Resources, as a failsafe to ensure that the BOD never exceeds the plant’s capacity.
That’s when Morrisville Water and Light began testing BOD levels all over town to try and determine where the source.
The utility’s general manager, Craig Myotte, said their first suspicion was Butternut Mountain Farm, because the maple sugar it produces could potentially cause sugar to be getting into the wastewater. But after speaking with Butternut’s owners, Myotte said their first impression was Butternut wasn’t the source, largely because of what Butternut told them about how much they value their maple product and how carefully they ensure that it doesn’t go down the drain.
However, after further testing, Myotte said the utility determined that Butternut was one of the primary contributors. He said some flaws in their process for cleaning barrels allowed more maple than they realized to get into the wastewater system.
Myotte said other businesses also tested high — namely the two breweries.
The owners of Lost Nation and Rock Art, though, contest the utility’s assertion. They say their own internal BOD testing uses testing methods that are more accurate than those used by Morrisville Water and Light. They said their tests showed the high BOD levels were not coming from their sites.
They said their BOD levels were not much higher than that of a residential home. But they continued to make as many changes as they could to keep reducing their BOD levels as much as possible.
Both the owners of the breweries and the leadership at the utility said once the problem was identified at Butternut, the owners were accommodating and moved quickly to resolve the problem. (No officials from Butternut were available to speak about the issue.)
And the changes worked — shortly after Butternut made those changes, by all measures, the town’s wastewater remedies appeared to be remedied. In 2019, Myott said the flow level at the plant was 55%, and the BOD level was 60% — the lowest it had been since 2012.
But what the breweries were surprised to learn was that even after the plant’s numbers came back down to normal, the utility remained set on hiking their rates.
Allen Van Anda, co-owner of Lost Nation Brewing, said both their business and Rock Art ended up spending thousands of dollars on lawyers to try and make sure that didn’t happen, since the rates that were being proposed simply weren’t viable for them. Van Anda said he expects the new rate will cost them as much as $16,000 per year.
What they were especially disappointed to find out, he said, was that the utility had no oversight when it came to making those changes.
While changes in electricity rates have to be approved by the Public Service Board, and changes in water rates have to be approved by a town-wide vote, no such mechanism exists for wastewater rates. The board of Morrisville Water and Light could approve the change single-handedly, with little the breweries can do about it.
“It’s a good ol’ boys club over there,” Nadeau said. “This small group of five trustees, who don’t really know much — if anything — about sewer and water, they’re just following what the GM [general manager] is telling them.”
The brewers said they’re trying to work with their state representatives to change the laws to get more oversight for cases like theirs. Even Myotte said that ideally, the rates should be up to local government. But no bill was introduced this session to make that happen, and it’s now too late to introduce new legislation for this year.
Van Anda said even under current law, he’s not sure the rate changes that were imposed were legal.
He said their lawyer determined that per state law, changes in wastewater rates have to be “fair and equitable.”
“You can’t just not identify where the BOD problem is coming from, randomly select three businesses, and then impose a dramatic new fee structure on them that’s not fair and not equitable,” he said.
Morrisville Water and Light said the new rates aren’t trying to change any past inequity, they’re just making things right for the future. Myotte said the higher rates are off-setting the additional costs of monitoring, treating, and processing for the higher BOD levels at the three businesses in question.
Nick Giannetti, the pre-treatment coordinator with the Department of Environmental Conservation’s wastewater treatment division, said the state supports rates that are set in manner that ensures the town can pay for and maintain its facility, conduct routine repairs, and budget for growth and upgrades.
He said the new high-strength rates that are being implemented in Morrisville aren’t common in Vermont, though they exist in a few towns, like Shelburne and Middlebury, but Giannetti said they’re actually very common nationally.
Giannetti said the state doesn’t get involved in how those rates are calculated, and so he doesn’t know whether the rates in question were calculated fairly.
“It might be sticker shock, I just don’t know,” he said.
Myotte said although rates for the other customers in Morrisville won’t go down immediately, it’s his hope that will happen in the future.
“My overriding guidance is to make sure that we don’t have one group of customers subsidizing another,” Myotte said. “It’s a rule I try to live by.”
But the breweries said if the costs for others aren’t going to go down immediately, it doesn’t make sense that theirs should be immediately hiked so dramatically.
And the worst part of it all, they said, was that at a meeting about the rate hikes a few months ago, representatives from Morrisville Water and Light got up and reminded everyone that as time goes on, they can change the rate structure at any point.
“Who knows, we could very well be back here doing this all again next year,” the representative said, according to Nadeau.
“They can just go back and change the rate structure to suit themselves and their needs whenever they want,” Van Anda said. “This will just always be looming.”