Wall Street Sewage maintenance

Andy and myself have proposed that we take over maintenance and running of the Wall Street sewage system, as maintenance costs have been increasing leading to a cost per household of £125 this year, which is what we would be charged by a commercial water company for waste disposal in a suburban setting.

Andy has his reasons for doing this which we all know about - He's happy to contribute towards this cost from now on the condition that he and I take over the system.

My own reasons are mainly to reduce the cost and make best use of our technical knowledge and experience rather than relying on a third party company.

With these facts in mind we collectively drafted a letter to all Wall Street residents for signed approval - if we get a majority result, we will take over management of it.

UPDATE: 10th August 2010 
Andy and I had a meeting with Puck (Mark) today to try and make some sense of the percieved ignorant nonsensical negativity towards our proposals, which is not helping matters and so we made positive, constructive suggestions as to how we can get a consensus of opinion and actually start sorting this out between us instead of lining the pockets of the 3rd party pump management company.

Our suggestion:

If certain individuals can't trust me just because of an irrational fear of association, then the obvious solution is to manage it collectively by committee - so it seemed sensible to us that it should be me, Andy & Puck organising this. Simple. If after a year the three of us haven't reduced running costs, then someone else should step in and attempt to do better.

My Personal Opinion
I don't like being dictated to, especially if it involves uneccessary expense. We have the skills to do this ourselves collectively. I must admit, I'm tempted to start investigating getting my own seperate system if this nonsense doesn't stop soon, which could mean another contributor dropping out = which will mean everyone else will end up with even higher bills, and I certainly won't be lending my own electrical engineering expertise to helping a system I no longer subscribe to if our proposal gets objected.


UPDATE: 
As all the letters, discussions and knocking on doors and seperate discussions over the last few days are taking up a lot of time and becoming stressful - unfortunately despite Puck's valiant attempts, it really isn't getting us anywhere - so I suggested and proposed we have a meeting about sewage so hopefully we can move forwards with this with all residents on Saturday 14th August 2010 at 1pm.


CONCLUSION:
After a residents meeting, which got quite heated at times, Some interesting points, and disappointingly some soap-box ranting that kicked off the meeting and expected lack of cooperation from negative residents because of past troubles, we finally managed to proceed and keep the meeting in a positive.
Joe raised the issue of public liability insurance, for example if someone is injured while working in the sewage shed. Personally I think the litigation culture is something we can do without - If I injure myself I certainly won't be suing the other residents for compensation or whoever did the work badly. Despite my opinions, its a relevant point, although I dismissed it at the time - the thing to consider though is insurance puts up costs. 
Andy King also raised the issue about insurance cover, e.g. if the system fails. This made us wonder about the current maintenance contract. Usually sewage damage is covered by buildings insurance, although this is something we should investigate to see how we stand if there is any negligence either intentionally or unintentionally. 
The rest of the residents were understanding and reasonable as everyone saw how important this is to us as a community. 
Voting was split down the middle, with equal amounts of households in favour of our proposal until the final two people, who had trouble deciding, it came down to one person's decision. Finally after 2 hours it was decided by the remaining people at the meeting with the deciding votes that we should all get involved as a third option - no more "2 camps" and division in the community - instead we should all get involved. 


MY OPINION:
All in all a good outcome. At least everyone attended - which was good - despite the problems - good constructive stuff, despite how stressful it all was. I am a bit worried that things could get disorganised due to too many people being involved in the decision making process - that said I do believe we're all better moving together as a strong unit. So lets hope it all goes well.