Opinion

Opinion

Opinion piece for The Jefferson Review

Written by: Christina Meador

My water and sewer bill was $85 in August. In September, it was $165.

I'm not writing this because a bill went up. I'm writing this because I asked why, in writing, more than once, and I learned something this year that I think every resident of this town deserves to know: this city answers when it's protecting itself. It does not answer as a matter of course.

The trash rate

This spring, the Board of Aldermen raised the residential trash rate 47%, from $17.98 to $26.50 a month. The reason given was a 6% consumer price index adjustment. I looked up the actual index named, CPI-U, All Urban Consumers. The real number for that period was 3.5%.

Not close. Not a rounding difference. Just wrong.

I asked whether any alderman had actually read the underlying contract before voting on it. I asked whether it had ever been competitively bid in the ten years since the city's last self-reported increase. I asked because I found a private trash contract, on my own, in ten minutes, for less than what the city charges. A city-wide contract should beat what one household can negotiate alone. Ours doesn't.

I sent the Board eight written questions in July. I never received a response. Not an acknowledgment. Not a "we'll look into it." Nothing.

The water bill

Then came the water bill. The city's own notice said rate changes would begin with the July 15th–August 15th cycle. Mine hit a full cycle early, billing me for water I used before the Board had even voted.

My next bill showed 6,000 gallons, roughly triple my normal usage. Around the same time, my water meter started cycling through "88888888" instead of a number. I photographed it. I dated it. I kept asking.

I emailed the Board and the City Clerk asking how a meter that couldn't produce a reading had somehow produced one anyway.

Less than 24 hours later, the meter was quietly replaced.

I filed a formal dispute. I cited the city's own ordinance. I paid what I could actually verify.

They cashed the check. They never acknowledged the letter.

The water everyone is losing

My bill isn't the only water problem this city hasn't explained. Public Works has reported the city losing 43 to 45% of the water it treats, every month, for months now, water produced but never billed to anyone.

For a while, officials pointed to a possible explanation: miscalibrated meters and wells. At last month's meeting, that explanation quietly disappeared. Public Works told the Board the well contractor is now confident calibration isn't the problem after all, which leaves a straightforward question nobody has answered: if it isn't the meters, where is nearly half the city's water actually going?

The Public Works report that would normally address this wasn't given at the most recent meeting at all. So we don't know whether the leak officials found earlier this year actually accounts for the loss, whether it's still ongoing, or whether some of the "doubled" water bills residents have been posting about online, mine included, reflect a real system problem rather than a sudden, town-wide spike in how much water everyone happens to be using. For what it's worth, the city's own numbers show total water production fluctuating by less than a percentage point over the past year. Usage isn't the variable that's moved. Something else has.

The part that should bother everyone, not just me

Hillsboro only held a public hearing on the sewer rate because the increase legally couldn't take effect without one. That requirement surfaced the same day, according to the city's own billing records, that its attorney began researching the exact question I had just posted about, publicly, on my personal Facebook page.

Two months of private, written questions got silence.

One public post got a hearing scheduled within days.

I don't think that's a coincidence, and I don't think any resident here should be comfortable with it either. It tells you exactly which channel this city listens to. It isn't the one we're told to use.

I learned that lesson again after I sat at a public meeting and did nothing but take notes. Hillsboro's mayor responded on his own Facebook page, under his own name, by calling me a disgrace, and suggesting it was somehow improper for a private citizen to sit in a public meeting with a notebook.

Sit with that for a second. When residents ask quiet, documented questions, they get silence for months. When they ask louder, they get contempt from the person elected to represent them. Neither one is accountability.

The tax rate

Most recently, it's property taxes. Hillsboro's own notice shows assessed valuation rising by $1.4 million this year. The proposed rate is identical to last year's, to the ten-thousandth of a cent.

That sounds neutral. It isn't.

The city's own September 2025 agenda shows the rate actually went down the year before, from 0.5015 to 0.4839, specifically because valuation rose that year too. The city has done this math correctly before. A flat rate on a higher value is still a real increase, about $97 more on my own home this year, a home I haven't sold and haven't seen a dollar from.

I asked to see the calculation behind this year's rate, the one the city is legally required to review and file every year, before it ever reaches the county. I asked because the county doesn't check whether that math is right, only that the paperwork came in. Getting it right is the city's job. Catching it if they don't is the Board's job.

I checked the city's own building permit reports. Total permits dropped from 91 to 78 this year. New home permits were identical both years, five and five. New construction was flat. It cannot explain a $1.4 million jump in value that didn't exist last year.

I have not received an answer.

Other towns manage this just fine

Arnold held its own tax hearing this month. A council member asked, directly, whether the rate had been checked against the state's Hancock Amendment, the law that generally requires rates to fall when property values rise, so a windfall never happens without a vote. Staff answered on the spot: reviewed, no rollback needed, the small increase was from new construction. One question. One honest answer, in public.

Days later, De Soto held its hearing. Officials there drew the exact distinction I'm asking Hillsboro to draw, their small valuation increase was from new construction, not reassessment. That's precisely the accounting Hillsboro hasn't given.

Pevely's board, the same month, sat through a detailed public accounting of a lift station that burned through ten start capacitors and cost the city $3,600 a day in emergency pumping some weekends. They didn't bury it. They put the failure, the cost, and the fix in front of residents, in detail. Pevely raised its own tax rate too, by less than a quarter of a cent, and officials explained on the record exactly how that number came from the state's own formula.

Show the number. Explain the number. That's the whole standard, and three towns near us met it inside of two weeks. Hillsboro hasn't.

No one has shown their work

Underneath everything I've described sits one fact: the fiscal year covering nearly all of it has never been independently audited. The city's own accountant produced only a compilation, meaning nobody verified the numbers, and the firm says outright that it isn't independent from the city.

So when we're told costs went up, we're being asked to take it on faith.

I haven't seen a plan for where any of the new money goes, either. Not the $50,000 the trash increase was supposed to recover. Not the $7,000 extra the flat tax rate is generating. Nobody has told residents what either figure funds.

I'll mention one other city, not because I think Hillsboro is doing what it did, but because it shows how a small oversight gap becomes a big one. Kirkwood, a city with far more staff than Hillsboro, recently found a $15.6 million deficit that grew unnoticed for over a year, in part because routine financial reports to its own council simply stopped arriving during a staffing transition. Nobody set out to hide anything there. The silence alone was enough. Kirkwood's fix was an independent audit, because, in one council member's words, "we need an audit to find out what really happened."

That's the same thing I'm asking for here, before a small gap becomes a big one.

Why I noticed

Some people will ask why I think I have any business picking apart municipal finance. I interned as a legislative aide in the Missouri House in college. I work in corporate compliance now.

But that's not really why I caught this.

My own neighbors noticed the same things I did, in their own words, on their own timelines, without ever opening a contract or a federal dataset. Nobody needs a law degree to know a bill that doubled in one month doesn't add up. The wrongness is usually obvious long before the paperwork proving it is.

The only real difference between me and everyone else who noticed is that I kept asking after the first dismissal, and I didn't let myself be insulted into silence. Most people, reasonably, don't have the time or the stomach for that fight. That's not a failing in them.

It might be exactly what this Board is counting on.

What I actually want

I'm not asking for costs to freeze forever. I've said, publicly and repeatedly, that a reasonable increase tied to a real number doesn't bother me.

What I am asking for is smaller than it should have to be: an answer. A calculation. An acknowledgment that a resident's written question deserves a written response, not silence, and not an insult.

None of what I found took a law degree. It took reading what the city itself put in writing, and noticing what didn't match.

I don't think that should be rare. And I don't think it should keep falling to residents to do it quietly, for months, while being called a disgrace for the trouble.

I think it should be the baseline. Before the vote. Not after someone spends a summer proving she had to hold the line where our elected leaders wouldn't.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jefferson Review.

The Jefferson Review welcomes opinion submissions from Jefferson County voices across the political and civic spectrum. Publication is not based on political viewpoint, and submissions are considered without prejudice toward party, ideology, or position. All opinion submissions must promote respectful public discourse and may be edited for clarity, length, grammar, and style. The Jefferson Review reserves the right to decline submissions that contain personal attacks, hate speech, knowingly false or misleading claims, defamatory or slanderous statements, vulgar language, or content that does not meet our editorial standards.

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