RWSA officials’ meal tab: $1,623

Even as the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority sought to raise wholesale water rates, officials took their water-supply consultants out for a $1,623.04 dinner.
The March tab drew a red flag from RWSA’s finance director, who suspected the high cost was partially from alcohol being funded by public dollars.
The bill included the cost of meals, alcohol and a $247 tip. RWSA officials say the outing was held to get information from experts reviewing the cost and design of building a new dam at Ragged Mountain, a vital component of the area’s long-term water supply plan.
“I am very concerned over the amount of funds we are expending on items that are somewhat if not completely discretionary,” Lonnie Wood, director of finance and administration for the authority, wrote in a March e-mail to top RWSA officials. “I strongly recommend we use modest means for dinner arrangements, if it is necessary to have them in the future.”

Officials later decided to put up $225 “out of private pockets,” according to RWSA Executive Director Thomas L. Frederick Jr., to cover the estimated cost of alcohol from the $1,623 meal on March 10 and from a March 11 meal that cost $305.14, including tip.
Five men accrued the $305 bill at Hamiltons’ on the Downtown Mall, and Frederick estimated that about 20 people ate at the Ivy Inn Restaurant, where more than $1,623 was spent.
Assuming 20 people attended, the latter meal works out to more than $80 per person.
Frederick said that the Ivy Inn dinner was the best way to ease tension among some of the consultants and that it was the least expensive way to probe information essential to the water-supply plan.
“We had three of the best dam experts in the world in Charlottesville,” Frederick said Wednesday, adding that most of the consultants make more than $200 an hour, “and we were able to spend some time with them off the clock, if you will, getting free advice.”
“Given the hourly rate of those individuals, it would have probably cost us well between $6,000 and $7,000 to have done that on the clock,” Frederick said. “And the way we chose to do it was much less costly.”

“It actually was very, very productive,” Frederick said.
In an e-mail prior to the meeting, Frederick had requested that a dinner meeting be set up “without a formal agenda and as much social as business, though I’m sure these guys will want to talk about dams and our project.”
Frederick said Wednesday that because the experts were from out of town, it was customary that the client — RWSA — pays for travel, lodging and food.
The RWSA had hired the panel of experts to review the cost of building a new dam at Ragged Mountain after the cost estimate far more than doubled from the initial $37 million. The price tag shot upward after an engineering firm discovered fractured bedrock where the dam’s foundation would be built.
Frederick said the dinner outing was out of the norm for RWSA, so no guidelines had been established in the past about alcohol.
“I think that’s a fair lesson to learn from the process,” Frederick said, adding that it “probably would have had been smarter” to have had written guidelines in advance, regulating meal reimbursements.

As for why RWSA didn’t select a less expensive restaurant, Frederick said that officials were trying to create a comfortable atmosphere for the outside experts.
In May, RWSA voted to impose an 11.3 percent wholesale rate increase on Albemarle County for fiscal 2010 and increase Charlottesville’s rate 7.7 percent. Officials said the increases were necessary to absorb a decline in revenue from water and sewer bills and to pay for new infrastructure.
Both the city and the county subsequently revised their water rates, with Albemarle increasing rates substantially on heavy water users and the city passing an overall nominal increase.

The RWSA also began paying higher attorney fees sometime between the end of January and end of March. Kurt J. Krueger, a lawyer for McGuireWoods, raised his rates from $475 an hour to $515 an hour. In March, RWSA was billed $22,238.90, according to an RWSA document.
Frederick attributed the rate to Krueger’s experience and the value of his work.
“What we understand is that his rate is what you pay if you want to get an attorney with the kind of experience of Mr. Krueger,” Frederick said.