Fredonia is set to try again on a wastewater treatment contract with the Pomfret-Portland-Dunkirk Sewer District.

The village Board of Trustees supposedly ratified a new contract proposal with the district Sept. 10. The move took second billing at a meeting where public focus was on water service affairs, because of a vote to buy from Pomfret and wind down the village’s reservoir and water treatment plant.

However, the PPD sewer contract somewhat confusingly came up again at a Board of Trustees workshop Wednesday. Trustee Jon Espersen later told the OBSERVER that the sewer district and Chautauqua County wound up rejecting the September contract.

“We negotiated it for a long time, and will be, hopefully, accepting the contract,” Espersen said.

Trustee Paul Wandel said Wednesday, “We are now finalizing on the sewer use rates with the three towns, and the expectation of contract agreement and renewal and it should be happening very soon.”

Espersen replied, “We need to get that done so we can receive the payment for 2025 they’ve been holding off.” The payment is about $50,000.

The contract would be for three years. A pie chart was quickly flashed at Wednesday’s workshop in an attempt to show a breakdown of payments, but the chart proved impossible to decipher.

Trustee Michelle Twichell voted against the original contract in September and repeated the same concerns about the new proposal.

“As you know, I really feel that we should be charging at least what our residents are paying for their sewer,” she said. “I see the pie chart, but I really can’t make sense of that compared to what our residents are paying . Our residents are paying $8 (per 1,000 gallons of wastewater).”

Twichell asserted, “I would think that PPD should be paying at least equal to what our residents are paying. Those are my feelings on it and I know nobody will agree with me on that, but I just have to say what I feel about this.”

Eserpsen responded, “I think the thing working against that was, that would be more than doubling what they were paying in the last contract, and that’s a huge ask. I think whoever negotiated and signed the last contract kind of put us in a corner. There was going to be no way that they were going to agree to more than double what they paid last year — that was never going to happen.”

Twichell said it was her understanding that the district had issues with storm water going into processed sewage water. “So from my understanding, the trustees that were on this board at the time thought they deserved to pay half, so they could repair those issues. If you go back and look, that was the only time they were charged less than what our village residents were paying.”

Her comment was met with silence.

Trustees later went into executive session to discuss the contract negotiations. Attorney Melanie Beardsley of Webster Szanyi, the village government’s law firm, joined them.