MORGANTOWN — Tabled on first reading by Morgantown City Council more than a month ago, changes to Article 169 — the portion of city code pertaining to the utility board — remain a work in progress.
Morgantown Communications Specialist Hollie Gregory said details of the proposed ordinance are still being negotiated by the city and the Morgantown Utility Board and there is no timeline for when it will be back before council.
“The city and MUB have agreed to only publicly comment on the ongoing discussions as a group,” MUB Communications Director Chris Dale responded when asked for an update.
What is known is that Morgantown City Council and MUB will conduct a second joint meeting using a third-party facilitator on Wednesday evening. City council and the utility’s board of directors held a joint session with a facilitator in executive session on Oct. 4.
In late September, the city made public an ordinance amending Article 169 of city code changing the makeup of the utility’s board of directors and giving city council increased oversight over MUB projects.
The city brought the amendments forward with the stated goal of improving “coordination, communication and accountability” in the wake of some recent rifts between the two.
MUB came out strongly opposed to the ordinance, which, as originally presented, would reserve one of the utility board’s five seats for a member of council and make the city manager a non-voting member. It also included a provision under which MUB would need city council’s approval for projects.
This increased oversight troubled MUB leadership as well as representatives of the county, given more than half of MUB’s customers and all the major development requiring millions in utility upgrades are currently outside city limits.
Article 169 states that no more than two members of the MUB Board of Directors can reside outside city limits. The city’s proposed amendment would not change that.
During a July discussion with The Dominion Post Editorial Board — some two months before Article 169 was rolled out — Morgantown City Manager Kim Haws conceded the city/MUB relationship is complicated by the fact that a municipal utility is operating well beyond municipal boundaries.
One, he said, that eliminates a strong incentive for annexation into the city.
Two, it puts city council in a position to appoint board members and approve rates for people who have no council representation.
“The fees that are charged and the city council passes and are approved by the public service commission really impact more people than just the citizens, and that changes the nature of MUB. It really does, because [city council] don’t represent people outside the corporate limits, and I don’t. Yet they’re tasked with having to serve two masters, so to speak, the non-residents and the residents,” he said.
Morgantown City Council passed a city budget of $39,486,629 in March, and later adjusted it to $42,882,629, reflecting an additional $3,396,000 in carryover.
MUB’s current budget is $36.9 million. The utility is completing more than $7 million in system improvements to handle the expansion of the Morgantown Industrial Park and is seeking $14 million to upgrade infrastructure supporting future development at WestRidge and the larger Chaplin Hill/Mylan Park area.
“MUB is not completely independent. It can’t be by law. It’s a creature of the city, and yet from MUB’s standpoint, they kind of do their own thing. We don’t micro-manage,” Haws said in July. “They don’t come to me and say ‘We want to run a line.’ We don’t have that kind of oversight. We could, I suppose. We could structure it so I’d be managing the utility, too. That’s the way it was in Bridgeport, for instance. We had a Bridgeport Utility Board, but the mayor was the chair of that board, and I was a voting member of that board.”
Morgantown City Council voted 4-3 on Oct. 4 to table the ordinance amending Article 169.
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