Borough Discusses Westwood Resolution, Plans to Invite United Water to Meeting

At the May 9 work session, the Mayor and Council discussed t. The governing body also discussed several matters related to New Milford's flood management.

"United Water is going to manage the water and protect the dam," said Mayor Ann Subrizi. "We can only ask them to help with flood mitigation."

Several members of the council shared questions they had regarding flood and water management.

"When was the last time they had to look at their capacity," said Councilwoman Celeste Scavetta. "Because we have less places for water to go, a lot more development, everything upstream -- I want to know when the last time a determination was made on capacity."

"Everyone has an idea and we are micromanaging the water management of United Water," said Subrizi. "There’s a lot of choices here and we are not water managers."

Scavetta said United Water representatives need to come to a meeting so that questions could be asked and answered.

"We will ask the water company to come to our June 13 work session to answer questions in the vein of their policies of water management to help us flood less," said Subrizi.

Several members of the council inquired about the answers the borough engineer had submitted in response to flooding questions residents posed at the April 25 public session.

"I did a verbatim transcript that I sent to the engineer," said Borough Administrator Christine Demiris. "He highlighted what he thought were unanswered questions and the answers that were provided need to be interpreted."

"What they sent was absolutely ludicrous, can they send it in layman’s terms?" said Scavetta. "One of these charts has 17 different colors going in different directions."

Subrizi said that in addition to inviting United Water, a request would be made to Boswell Engineering to attend the meeting and provide answers in "layman's terms" to residents' questions from the April 25 meeting.