At a raucous meeting Wednesday night, the Ross Valley Sanitary District board elected its newest member, Mary Sylla, to serve as president of the board.
Supporters of Sylla and Frank Egger, the former board president who was seeking re-election, attended the meeting to lend their vocal support. Sylla was elected on a 3-2 vote with board members Egger and Pamela Meigs voting in the minority.
"It became a little bit more polarizing than I had hoped," said Sylla, who lives in Kentfield and works as program director for the Public Health Institute.
Egger said, "It was a donnybrook."
In a letter to the board, Egger recounted his efforts to keep the district afloat after the disappearance of former general manager, Brett Richards, in July 2012. Richards was arrested earlier this month in the Philippines and is facing nine felony counts including misappropriation of public funds, embezzlement and multiple counts of money laundering.
In his letter, Egger noted that the previous three presidents of the board served two-year terms and wrote that he had "worked almost full time keeping our agency afloat from July 2012 until Greg Norby came on board in mid February as interim general manager." He noted that the previous three board presidents had served two-year terms.
Egger served 39 years on the Fairfax Town Council and was the longest-serving municipal council member in California before he lost his bid for re-election there in 2005.
Sylla said she decided to run for president of the board after spending the day with Norby.
"He's such a capable general manager," Sylla said. "I just thought the board wasn't helping him to the degree it ought to be. Next year is going to be a really important year for the district."
The vote to elect Sylla was the same as last week's vote by the board on a $19.2 million revenue bond.
Egger and Meigs voted against the bond saying they had reservations about using it to refinance $11 million of existing debt. They said they supported a smaller bond to raise $8.2 million for the district to make wastewater system improvements. The board voted 3-2 to issue the bonds.
Norby said the refinancing will put the district in a better position if it needs to issue additional bonds in the future to support long-term capital projects.
In November, the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board notified the district it was violating state law by allowing sewage to overflow into local waterways and failing to allocate adequate resources for repair of its failing pipes.
The water board has told the district it must come up with a short-term plan for fixing 45 pipe locations, which are most likely to fail first; a longer-term plan for repairing another 800 locations; and a strategy for producing the needed revenue for keeping all 200 miles of the district's pipes in working order.
San Anselmo Councilman Tom McInerney said, "Frank was instrumental in righting the ship at the district. With that said, Mary has been a tremendous asset to the district as well, and I think she'll do a great job as president."
Contact Richard Halstead via e-mail at rhalstead@marinij.com
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