The Elmira Water Board

A Fight Is Happening Right Now

In its most recent annual report, the Water Board told the Mayor and City Council, in writing, that the city is trying to take its money — and that it intends to resist.

In the Water Board's letter to the Mayor and Council attached to its 2025 Annual Report, board president Martin D. Chalk wrote, verbatim:

"If the City's efforts to redirect funds from the water system are successful, it will result in fewer resources available for the operation, maintenance, and replacement of the water system."

That single sentence confirms two things. First, the City of Elmira is currently pursuing a share of the Water Board's money. Second, the Water Board is publicly resisting. What the letter doesn't say is that the state told the city to do exactly this in 2016 — or that the city's own charter has permitted it for over a century. This page assembles the documents and the numbers so you can referee the dispute yourself.

Who Runs It — and How You Hold Them Accountable

The Water Board is not a private company and not an unaccountable authority. It is run by five commissioners elected by City of Elmira voters — except that "voters," here, turns out to mean a startlingly small and specific group. That is the paradox of this page: the public's leverage over the Water Board is enormous, precisely because almost no one uses it.

Under the Elmira City Charter (Article X-A, enacted by the State Legislature in 1913 and re-enacted in 1950), the Water Board consists of five commissioners elected to staggered five-year terms. The election is held in a city-run special election on the first Tuesday in June each year (Charter § 166-b) — separate from the November general election and not run by the county Board of Elections. Commissioners are paid $75 per meeting attended (§ 166-a), can be removed for cause by the City Council (§ 166-d), and the board meets monthly at the Filtration Plant, One Fountain Drive, in public.

Here is how small "elected" really is. These are the certified canvass results, straight from the City Council minutes that accept them:

24 votes 2025 election (June 3)
Steve McNamara, unopposed — 23 votes + 1 write-in

8 votes 2024 election (June 4)
Martin Chalk — now board president — unopposed

~26,000 City residents
the electorate these commissioners answer to

A five-member board that controls a $41-million asset and a $7.9-million surplus was seated, in its two most recent elections, by eight and twenty-four voters — both times with a single candidate on the ballot. And the franchise is narrow by design: under § 166-b, only City of Elmira resident taxpayers age 21 or older whose names appear on the assessment roll may vote — renters, a large share of a city with a 30% poverty rate, are excluded. The election is publicized only by two legal notices in the city's official paper.

Which is exactly why the public's levers here are so powerful:

Elect them. A commissioner seat is on the ballot every June, and recent races were decided by single- and double-digit turnout. A few dozen organized voters could decide who controls the surplus.
Remove them for cause. The City Council holds that power under § 166-d.
Make the request. The City Council can formally ask for the surplus under § 166-o (below).
Show up. The board meets in public, monthly, at the Filtration Plant.

Current board (2025): Robert L. Briggs, M. Robby Robertson (VP), Thomas E. Ramich, Martin D. Chalk (President), Steven McNamara. General Manager: Alyssa Melens. Turnout figures are from the certified election canvasses accepted by the City Council (resolutions 2024-208 and 2025-171).

The Money, Read Honestly

"The Water Board is sitting on $41 million" is the easy line — and it's misleading. Most of that is the value of the pipes and the plant, which you can't spend. But strip those out and there is still a large, growing pile of flexible cash the city is being told doesn't exist.

The Water Board's net position keeps climbing while its debt disappears — and it has sent the city nothing since 2002. Net position (total accumulated equity) and outstanding bonds, from the NYS Comptroller's Annual Update Document (water enterprise fund, prefix “EW”); transfers to the city (line EW99019) are the flat line along the bottom. The net-position series matches the Board's audited financial statements to the dollar.

The audited 2025 balance sheet breaks the $41.4M net position into three parts:

$33.2M Tied up in capital assets
the pipes, plant, reservoirs — not spendable

$0.3M Restricted for capital
legally committed

$7.9M Unrestricted — flexible
grew +$0.9M in 2025 alone; ~$5.6M is cash

The honest framing isn't "hoarding $40 million." It's this: the Water Board holds roughly $7.9 million in unrestricted reserves — money not committed to anything — and that pile grew by about $934,000 in 2025 alone, on top of a $744,190 audited surplus struck after $1.27M of depreciation. Its operating income was positive; its debt is nearly gone. This is not an enterprise scraping by.

What It Pays — and What It Doesn't

The Water Board pays real estate taxes on its water infrastructure in the suburban towns. On the infrastructure inside the City of Elmira it pays no property tax at all. That includes its filtration plant. The in-city property is worth nearly $20 million.

Where	What	Assessed value	Taxable value	On the tax roll?

Same system, opposite treatment inside the city line. The Board's in-city water system is the filtration plant at 1 Fountain Drive, the distribution mains, and the wells. It is assessed at $19.7M and marked wholly exempt (roll section 8), so it pays the city $0. The same kind of property just over the city line is treated the opposite way. The Board's water-supply and transmission lines in Southport, Horseheads, Big Flats, and the Town of Elmira sit on the taxable utility roll (section 6). That is where the ~$237K/yr the Board actually pays comes from. New York does tax utility distribution property, which is why NYSEG is one of the city's top taxpayers. The Board's in-city system is exempt only because it belongs to the city's own water department (Charter § 166-u). On the city rolls like anyone else's utility property, the illustrative bill would be about $363K/yr to the city. Counting the school and county levies, roughly $1.05M/yr.

What the Law Actually Says

The city's power to ask for the surplus is written into the charter. The charter even uses the words "fair return." But a 2007 opinion from the State Attorney General explains why the city cannot simply take it.

The mechanism: Charter § 166-o. The charter says that "upon a timely request by the City Council, any profits or surplus in Water Board funds may be used by the City for general municipal purposes." The same section lets the Board set water rates high enough to cover two things. One is a tax-equivalent amount: what the Board would owe in tax if its property were taxable. The other is "a fair return on the value of its property." So the city already has a lever, and "fair return" is the charter's own wording.

The catch: NY Attorney General Informal Opinion No. 2007-6. The city asked whether it could force the issue. The Attorney General said it could not. The Water Board, not the City, decides how much surplus exists. And the city cannot amend its charter to take that power, because the State Legislature created the Board as an independent "body corporate." Only a new state law could change that. The opinion also records, plainly, that "recently, the Water Board denied a request from the City for surplus Water Board funds." That was 2007. The standoff is old.

Elmira Alone Carries the Risk

The Water Board serves five municipalities. Only one of them is on the hook if the system loses money, and it is the one getting nothing back.

Under Charter § 166-s, the City of Elmira has to cover any Water Board shortfall. The Board also serves the Village of Elmira Heights and parts of Southport, Horseheads, and the Town of Elmira. Those places are customers, not co-signers. None of them shares that liability. So City of Elmira taxpayers alone carry the whole downside of a $41-million enterprise, and get $0 of its upside.

And there's a mutual-interest argument the Board is missing. Moody's rates the City of Elmira Ba1, which is junk, so the city pays more to borrow. The city is also the body that must bond for major water-system capital (§ 166-t) and backstop the Board's losses (§ 166-s). A fair-return payment that strengthens the city's finances would therefore lower the cost of the very borrowing the water system may one day need. A healthier city is a cheaper backstop. Withholding everything is, in part, self-defeating.

The State Told the City to Do This

This isn't an activist's proposal. New York convenes a Financial Restructuring Board to help distressed municipalities. In 2016 that board told Elmira to pursue a fair return from the Water Board, and pointed to two cities already doing it.

The Financial Restructuring Board's 2016 Comprehensive Review of Elmira found that the city "should continue to encourage the Elmira Water Board to allocate a portion of its operational net income to the City… the City may receive a fair return/stipend." It cited two working precedents. Jamestown receives $500,000 a year from its Board of Public Utilities. The Albany Water Board provides Albany roughly $750,000 a year. It also cited a legal basis: General Municipal Law § 94, alongside the city charter.

The Board has a fair objection. It serves customers outside the city, so it cannot simply hand its profits to Elmira. The state supplied the answer to that: take the share of Water Board revenue that comes from within the City of Elmira and apply that share to the surplus. On that basis, a fair-return payment would plausibly land somewhere between these bookends:

~$370K/yr A city-share of the surplus
≈ half — the city is ~26K of ~54K people served (estimate)

~$744K/yr The full 2025 surplus
the upper bound

$500–750K What Jamestown & Albany collect
the real-world benchmark

The city-share figure is an estimate; the exact split requires the Board's revenue by jurisdiction, which is not public. All three bookends land in the same range — a recurring sum on the order of a few percent of the city's property-tax levy, collected without touching a single homeowner's bill.

Twenty Years of Standoff

The city has asked before. The board has said no before. The state has weighed in twice. Here is the documented arc.

2007 — The City requests surplus funds. The Water Board denies the request. The city asks the State Attorney General whether it can amend the charter to force the amount. The AG says no (Informal Op. 2007-6).
2016 — The state's Financial Restructuring Board reports that the City and Board are "currently involved in a lawsuit regarding charter language as it relates to additional payments to the City from the Water Board's surplus," and recommends the fair-return approach anyway.
March 2025 — The City Council holds a public hearing on a charter amendment concerning the Water Board — publicly framed as a relocation (a new office near the filtration plant; the old West Water Street building would return to the city and could be sold and re-taxed). A separate matter from the surplus fight, and its outcome isn't yet confirmed in the public record.
2025 — In its annual report to the Mayor and Council, the Water Board states that "the City's efforts to redirect funds from the water system" are underway, and signals it will resist.

The Water Board's Case Is Real

An honest accounting has to include the other side. The Board's infrastructure argument is genuine — it just doesn't fully survive its own balance sheet.

The Water Board maintains 215–225 miles of mains, much of it laid before 1915, serving a population that has fallen from about 70,000 to 54,000. It is midway through a $4.5 million meter-replacement program, and it funds nearly all of its capital from water rates rather than borrowing. Aging pipe is a real, expensive, ongoing obligation, and the Board is right that every dollar diverted is a dollar not spent on it.

But "we need every dollar" doesn't square with the behavior. If the pre-1915 mains were a truly binding constraint, you'd expect the Board's unrestricted reserves to be flat or falling as it spends them down on replacement. Instead those reserves grew by about $934,000 in 2025. The Board added to its flexible cushion in the very year it warned that sharing funds would starve the system. Over the same year the bonds it still owes fell to $744,400, down from $21.6M in 1999. (That is almost the same number as the 2025 surplus by coincidence only. One is what the Board owes; the other is what it cleared.) The Board reinvests some. It is also, plainly, accumulating.

Two more points of fairness. The Board's "$0 to the city" is legal, not a loophole it invented — the charter (§ 166-u) exempts its property from city tax, and the Board does pay about $237,000 a year in real estate taxes on its property in the surrounding towns. And on the core question of how much surplus must be shared, the law really is on the Board's side: the city cannot simply take the money. It has to make the case — to an independently elected board, and to the voters who choose it.

What We Can't Yet Prove

Keeping our sources one click away means being clear about the edges of the record.

The Water Board's letter tells us the city is trying to redirect water funds. The city's own document behind that effort is another matter. The resolution, charter language, or negotiating position has not turned up in the public record we have been able to gather. The city's 2026 adopted budget contains no Water Board transfer line, so this looks like a live negotiation rather than booked revenue. Four other things we have asked for and not yet got: the full record of the 2016 charter lawsuit, the commissioners' pay, the outcome of the March 2025 charter vote, and the Board's exact revenue split by jurisdiction. Where those documents change the picture, we will update this page and say so, as we do with every correction.