Dunkirk Department of Public Works chief Randy Woodbury didn’t like what he saw at last week’s Fredonia Board of Trustees session. He splashed back at a city DPW committee meeting on negative comments about Dunkirk water and the North County Water District it supplies.

He said the recent hike in the price of water sold by Dunkirk to the NCWD “was not arbitrarily set by the city.” Instead, it came through a formula developed by SUNY Fredonia economics professor Peter Reinelt, who has worked with the NCWD from its inception.

Basically, “you take 11 budget lines of actual expenses, plug it into his spreadsheet, you have the number,” Woodbury said.

Woodbury always speaks highly of Reinelt and did so some more on Thursday. The professor is “a water economy genius,” he said. “He did his Ph.D. work in California, where water is a lot more valuable than here. … We’re proud of that formula. It’s all above board, it’s all mathematical.”

The DPW director then referred to a comment by Fredonia Trustee Michelle Twichell that she doesn’t trust Dunkirk when it comes to water.

“The formula is not arbitrary — you don’t have to trust anybody,” Woodbury said. “It’s written into a contract memorialized for 40 years,” referring to the agreement making Dunkirk sole water supplier to the NCWD.

In the bigger picture, “we think we have good water. We’re going to defend ourselves,” he said. “Whatever they wanna do (in Fredonia), that’s their choice. We think they treated us fairly with their analysis.”

Woodbury also commented, “I’ve taken tours of that (Fredonia water treatment) plant. Are there some issues with it? I have my own personal opinions that I am not going to share with anybody.”

He went on to hit back against Fredonia critics of Lake Erie water, stating that lake water serves far more customers than the Fredonia reservoir. “There’s a lot of initiative to make sure nothing bad happens to the Great Lakes,” he said.

Woodbury gave a fresh endorsement of the Dunkirk treatment plant’s carbon-activated filters, stating that they can, for example, filter out harmful materials from algae blooms.