The Advisory Board recommends a smaller FY27 assessment increase while looking at what long-term obligations will mean for member communities
What happens when stable rates meet rising long-term obligations?
How should communities weigh regional investments against the local work still ahead of them?
And when a dollar is collected from ratepayers today, how clearly should its value, timing, and burden be understood?
Those are the kinds of questions behind the MWRA Advisory Board’s recently approved Comments & Recommendations on MWRA’s Proposed FY27 Current Expense Budget and Capital Improvement Program. The Advisory Board approved the FY27 Comments & Recommendations on May 14, 2026, and formally transmitted them to MWRA on May 18, 2026. MWRA’s responses are anticipated at its June 24th Board of Directors meeting.
The practical recommendation is straightforward: the Advisory Board recommends reducing MWRA’s proposed combined wholesale assessment increase from 2.99% to 2.50%. That recommendation reflects a net reduction of $4,332,350 to the proposed Rate Revenue Requirement, resulting in a recommended combined Rate Revenue Requirement of $900,731,374.
But this year’s FY27 Comments & Recommendations are not only about the size of one annual adjustment. They are also about what comes next.
MWRA’s proposed FY27 budget reflects real near-term stability. Rate increases remain measured. Operations continue at a high level. The rate framework remains familiar and disciplined. That is good news for member communities, and it did not happen by accident.
Over time, MWRA and the Advisory Board have helped build a rate-setting framework centered on sustainable and predictable assessments. Communities now rely on that framework in their own local planning. It gives municipal officials, water and sewer staff, finance teams, and ratepayers a clearer sense of what to expect from year to year.
The question now is not whether that framework worked. It did.
The question is whether it is enough for the next era.
The system is entering a period where long-term obligations are beginning to stack together: major capital needs, aging infrastructure, CSO planning, pension and OPEB (other post-employment) obligations, workforce pressures, regulatory uncertainty, market constraints, and local community needs that do not pause just because regional costs rise.
That is why the Advisory Board’s FY27 review points toward an evolution in the framework: sustainable and predictable assessments depend on responsible decisions underneath them.
Responsible decisions do not mean avoiding investment. They do not mean saying no to environmental progress, workforce needs, or system renewal. They mean asking whether major commitments are justified, transparent, properly timed, clearly assigned, and understood in the full context of what communities and ratepayers are being asked to carry.
Put simply: the value must be worth the burden. That is the practical test for responsible decision-making.
That idea runs through the FY27 Comments & Recommendations.
In the budget process itself, the Advisory Board focused on the role of “Spring Revisits,” the late-stage updates that can occur between MWRA’s proposed budget and final adoption. These updates can improve accuracy when they refine assumptions with better information. But the Advisory Board also recommends formalizing an important expectation: final assessments should remain at or below proposed assessments unless any increase is clearly explained and available for review before final adoption. Spring Revisits should refine the budget, not redefine it.
In personnel, the Advisory Board recognizes MWRA’s real workforce challenges. Recruiting, retaining, and supporting the staff needed to operate a complex regional utility is essential. At the same time, personnel budgeting should reflect actual staffing patterns and persistent vacancies. The FY27 Comments & Recommendations therefore call for adjustments that better align the budget with workforce reality, while also emphasizing transparency around recurring personnel surplus and its relationship to defeasance and long-term rate management.
In long-term planning, the Advisory Board recommends convening a Long-Term Rates Management Working Group to evaluate major obligations across planning periods. That includes the interaction of Deer Island asset protection, the Metropolitan Water Tunnel Program, CSO-related investments, pension and OPEB obligations, and other capital, regulatory, and operating pressures. The point is not to treat each issue as isolated. The point is to see how they accumulate.
The CSO Long-Term Control Plan is one of the clearest examples of why that matters. The region has already made major investments and achieved major progress in reducing CSO discharges. The next phase, however, involves choices with potentially significant community-level cost, debt, construction, and disruption impacts. That is why the Advisory Board has emphasized the need to translate technical alternatives into practical community impacts, including what different levels of protection could mean for assessments over time.
The same logic appears in other areas as well. Procurement trends, 8(m) notification improvements, and watershed forestry review all point toward the need for better information, usable data, and clearer decision paths. The goal is not more process for its own sake. The goal is better visibility before commitments become obligations.
That is the broader story of this year’s FY27 Comments & Recommendations.
The recommended reduction from 2.99% to 2.50% matters. But the larger message is that stable rates today do not eliminate the need for disciplined review of tomorrow’s obligations. Every regional dollar collected from member communities lands in local budgets, alongside local sewer, stormwater, infrastructure, staffing, and capital needs.
Ratepayer protection is not cost avoidance. It is the work of making sure communities are asked to fund the right dollars, for the right reasons, through the right process — so the framework they rely on remains sustainable, predictable, and responsible.
The full FY27 Comments & Recommendations are available here: MwraadvisoryboardPFY27 Comments & Recommendations
The Advisory Board will review MWRA’s response following the June 24th Board of Directors meeting and will continue updating member communities as the FY27 budget process moves forward.
📕 Read the full Comments & Recommendations
