Letter to the Editor,

For 135 years, water and wastewater have been

public utilities in Holyoke, operated by the city

without profit, for the benefit of the citizens. 

The decision for public operation was made at a

time when women couldn’t vote and children worked

14hr days in the mills, yet the city fathers were

progressive enough to see the social value of

public control of water and wastewater.  The

political capital to make this decision came from

the labors of the first generation of industrial

workers in the city, many Irish arriving here

after the Great Potato Famine in the 1840’s.  

These men worked for a generation digging the

canals of Holyoke with picks and shovels, and the

women and children worked long hours in the

mills, and in 1871 moved to take control of their

water system as a public trust.

Last night, the Board of Public Works (BPW) voted

to violate that public trust by approving a

20-year privatization contract with Aquarion,

owned by Kelda Group, a UK-based multinational

water company eagerly privatizing water and

wastewater systems throughout New England.  Mayor

Sullivan’s grandfather worked his whole life for

Holyoke’s Department of Public Works, and yet

last night, Sullivan’s appointees on the Board of

Public Works sold out the city and the current

workers to a private, for-profit corporation, one

that drove their workers in Bridgeport to a

strike vote in Nov. 2003.  The unanimous vote to

privatize came as a shock to the dozens of

residents who have attended many meetings and

written pages of public comment in opposition to

and critical of the plan to privatize.

The city has given no consideration to optimizing

current public operation, but Bill Fuqua of the

Holyoke BPW has said that the BPW could do the

work, and has stated that the City Council still

has the option of requesting that the city

continue to run the sewer system without being

privatized.  HDR Inc., one of the consulting

firms that drew up Holyoke’s plans for

privatization, worked with the city of San Diego

to create an award-winning public optimization

plan that saved the city $90m over 5 years, and

yet our Mayor and the BPW has not even done an

optimization study to see what more efficient

public operation might look like.

I’m a member of Holyoke Citizens for Open

Government(HCOG) and we are concerned that this

decision-making process has been rushed and that

the contract itself is flawed, and numerous

questions remain unanswered.  City Councilor

Helen Norris and others have repeatedly asked the

BPW what the real costs to Holyoke would be if

the city decided to reverse privatization and no

satisfactory answers to this have been

forthcoming.  We call for greater transparency

and full public disclosure of the real costs of

privatization, not numbers from Malcolm-Pirnie

cooked to favor the Mayor’s plan.  HCOG wants to

make sure that the residents of Holyoke

understand that the city's ratepayers do have the

option to fund a public project to clean up the

river.

The decision to privatize is now in the hands of

the Mayor and the City Council.  We call on the

Mayor not to sign the contract with Aquarion. 

Citizens have not been fully informed, and we

demand that a postcard be sent to all ratepayers

informing them of this momentous decision, and

that public comment be extended a full six weeks

after the mailing, and that a public hearing be

held in the middle of this period to fully inform

residents.

Recent BPW meetings have seen the largest

attendance ever, according to Mr. Fuqua, and yet

this public opposition to privatization has not

swayed the board.  We demand that the City

Council vote against any rate hike or

appropriation of funds until continued public

operation has been given full-consideration.  We

ask the Holyoke City Council to hold a public

hearing on this issue.

We have a website on this issue:  http://water.homestead.com

I commend your newspaper on its coverage of this

story, and hope you will print this letter. 

Thanks for your consideration.

Yours for public wastewater,

Brian Oelberg

95 West Glen St.

Holyoke, MA  01040