Letter to the editor from Donald Weyer:
Honorable Batavia City Council and respected City Manager Tabelski, you're considering a proposal for us city water-service payers to "assume the position" so that you can seamlessly lubricate and insert a stormwater fee onto our water bills (The Batavian report of 1/9/24).
So now it's all your duties, elected and appointed officials, to go on fishing expeditions and fly-cast about for further ways to hook cash out of our pockets to put in the creel-caches of city coffers? Well, I think with this "stormwater" fee, you just snagged a smelly and ugly stinkfish or the cadaver of a huge and rotting carp!
I understand that stormwater is the runoff from rain and snow storms, both the results of the acts of a higher being (Mother Nature, God, the Universe, call it what you will), not the results of agency by water-service payers. And that the runoff ends up in the city streets and then the city sewers, and then further, I have no idea where—the first two, the clear budgetary responsibility of the city, for which the city has already exacted tribute, and we payers have already paid our pelf, our costly and clean lucre, via property taxes and water bills!
Too much logic and reason for your higher minds, City Council and Rachael? Therefore, you can do one of three things:
- Charge the fee to the storms.
- Charge the fee off to the city's "cost of doing business."
- Charge, do, nothing (and I am not implying that that is your usual modus operandi; I am leaving that up to the judgment of the readers of this petition to our vaunted "city fathers" [and "mothers" too], in lieu of my appearance at an eventual "hearing" on this topic before, again, celebrated and considerate City Council.
Let's not weigh down city taxpayers with further taxes, fees, charges, surcharges, assessments, calls on, or impositions on their financial assets! Batavia is a fairly decent city, our "baby." Let's not "throw the baby out with the bathwater," er, stormwater!
