PORT RICHEY — It was a bold move for a city manager who had only been in office for a couple of months.
7 Months Ago
6 Months Ago
6 Months Ago
Port Richey City Manager Vince Lupo called for a resolution to do away with a proposed 4 percent increase in city water rates, slated to take effect in November of last year. He called the increase unfair and unnecessary.
His bosses agreed — unanimously. Their approval of the resolution came on the heels of a speech by Lupo that left no doubt how he felt about the way the city’s water department had been handled.
He told the council he could make up for the revenue the increase would generate simply by correcting previous administrative "incompetence" in the department.
"The reason I knew we could easily make up the shortfall was that I became aware of the utter incompetence, mismanagement and sheer neglect of the city’s water production and distribution system over the last four or five years," Lupo told the council.
During an interview in his City Hall office last week, Lupo sat with Mayor Dale Massad and new public works director Chris Hughes — the longtime previous director, Pat Stewart, recently resigned — to discuss his sorrow over the condition of the city’s water infrastructure when he arrived.
The city manager described and showed pictures of pipes caked with impacted dried iron sludge, damaged or broken valves, two of four neglected water filters out of operation, and a rusted-out iron rehydration system, preventing the city from reclaiming millions of gallons of water. He showed pictures of one of the city’s eight water wells with a hole in the roof and exposed wires on the wall and floor.
"I almost cried," Lupo said of finding the conditions.
For months, he said, city staffers have been working around the clock doing back-breaking repairs that should have been done routinely over the years. The result has been an improvement in water quality and a projected savings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said, because of the city’s dependence on having to buy water from neighboring New Port Richey on a daily basis.
"The system was in a state of utter disrepair," he said.
Lupo said he hopes that by April his "around the clock" maintenance revamp will be completed, and then the city can figure out what water rates will need to be. He said he’s optimistic they can remain unchanged.
Former City Manager Tom O’Neill, Lupo’s predecessor, is unconvinced and says that kind of thinking Makrobet should have every Port Richey water customer concerned.
O’Neill, who resigned last year after clashing with Massad over myriad issues, told the Tampa Bay Times that Port Richey’s water utility has serious problems, both financially and with its infrastructure.
O’Neill said that is why he spent much of his four-plus years as city manager sounding an alarm and working to get a study in front of the City Council that outlined the need for a 20 percent increase in water rates over five years to deal with a two-pronged problem.
First, O’Neill believes saltwater intrusion and iron contamination are very real problems, revealed when he had an engineer test the water during brown-water complaints in 2013, which led to his backing down well production and buying more water from New Port Richey to ease the strain on the system.
Lupo discounts those assertions, saying maintenance failures were the problem. Now that those issues are being dealt with, he said, he has been able to return to higher production levels from the wells.
Second, O’Neill said he pushed for the water rate increases because the city had long been wrongly relying on its Community Redevelopment Agency, whose money is supposed to spent on combating blight, to keep the water and sewer enterprise fund afloat. He added that he constantly battled infrastructure breakdowns and disrepair with what little funding he had.
Massad said all that was needed was to bring Lupo — whom he calls "the maestro" — into the mix to bring the water department back to its best years, when Lupo last served as city manager from 1996 to 2004. Massad also laid Lupo’s claims of poor maintenance at O’Neill’s feet.
"Those pictures paint all that we need to know about his expertise," Massad said of O’Neill. "That didn’t happen over a matter of months. That took years."
O’Neill declined to comment on the current administration personally, but said the rhetoric reminds him of a time prior to his arrival as city manager that led Port Richey to struggle financially to the point where the state warned of a financial emergency due to utility fund problems and threatened intervention.
"Look, I am not city manager anymore, so they can do what they want. I made the decisions I thought were best for the city, but there are serious issues," O’Neill said. "I just don’t believe in doing things on the cheap when it comes to water, which is a public safety issue. If I were a Port Richey citizen, I would be concerned with that."
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