More Con from the Con Man, but Your Water Rates Will be up $63.21/month by the End of 2024

The neighborhood Con Man, who traffics in ignominy of our neighborhood volunteers, was at it again last week, posting to NextDoor his poisonous scandalmongering about the WOWSC’s addition of $39.21 to all our water bills. He makes up a lot of garbage that does not bear repeating because it is all inaccurate, but you can read his NextDoor post below.

The simple fact is that the Public Utility Commission set rates for Windermere Oaks Water Supply Corporation and the recent rate increase is due to their January 2024 rate setting in the 50788 rate case.

You would think the Con Man would be better informed because he is the spouse of one of the Ratepayer Representatives in the 50788 rate case which has been active since March of 2020.

But he enjoys his trafficking too much to be honest with the neighborhood, his marks.

As background, the rate protest was initiated by 10 percent of the members of the corporation in March 2020. You have them to thank for all the mess and expenses that have ensued. Their protest was against rates that had been increased by the Board in January 2020 to defend the company and eight former Board members against a mostly frivolous lawsuit. The lawsuit, which falsely alleged these former Board members were part of an organized criminal gang utilizing ‘constructive fraud’ was adjudicated and tried. In the end, the massive lawsuit only gained $35,000 for the WOWSC, at a combined cost of $2 million for all the parties, through a judgment against one former Board member. Everything else was dismissed by the court. You should see these two posts (1, 2) on the WOWSC website to understand the final outcomes from that case in 2022.

Fast forward to today: the January 2024 rates imposed on the water company by the Public Utility Commission have put the company on course for insolvency, as multiple Board members have said in recent months (see below Walker letter and Garceau letter).

The $39.21 legal surcharge added to your bill for November usage is part of the legal fee for representation by Lloyd Gosselink, from 2020 to 2023. Lloyd Gosselink is the firm which tried to save the WOWSC from the PUC’s absurd and costly rate case processes. A $39.21 surcharge has already been on our bills since April IIRC. This ‘new’ $39.21 is also part of the Lloyd Gosselink bill.

The company should have implemented this additional $39.21 surcharge earlier this year per the PUC’s original order. Because it is part of the PUC Order, this latest addition did not require action by the WOWSC Board. So thus the Con Man is wrong in his rant, as usual.

Basically, the $39.21 we have been paying is for our water connection, and the other $39.21 is for our sewage connection. The Board only implemented one connection surcharge earlier this year. They should have implemented both, per the PUC rate order. Thus no new action by the Board was necessary for this addition, no matter what the Con Man says. The company issued its own announcement on December 4, below.

Here’s more bad news though: Similarly, at the end of this month, you will see a new charge for $24 added to your bill, if you have both a water and sewage connection. Most of us do.

The new $24 fee will pay for the temporary manager, Anser, that was appointed by the Public Utility Commission to help the Board comply with all the PUC regulations foisted upon the water company and to manage its financial affairs. Anser has been tasked by the Public Utility Commission to recommend new rates. You can expect them to be much higher next year.

Again, Anser’s $24/month is a PUC-appointed charge to your water bills. The WOWSC Board and several members asked for the temporary manager and got it. We’re going to be paying for it.

Anser’s appointment bears more explanation.

Board members Jeff Walker and Rene Ffrench ran off our previous manager by refusing to pay him in timely manner for services he performed and which he paid for when provided by others. He resigned in January 2024.

Thus, our water system had operated without a manager since mid-January.

The back story is this: Numerous managers were approached in 2023 by a member who is not on the Board. He asked them to consider coming on as manager of our company. They rejected his invitation. They did not want to take over the management of WOWSC because of the litigious reputation of the rump group of members organized by the Con Man and his spouse.

Back to the bad news: So, yes, by the end of this month (December) our bills will be increased approximately $63 month from what they were in October. The new manager, Anser, will be taking $7,000 per month for their monthly management fee. In case your wondering, the previous manager who resigned in January, had been paid a little more than $4,000 per month. So the company will be paying $3,000 more per month than it had in 2023.

Here’s a breakdown of what you are seeing and what you will be seeing:

Amount	Purpose	Duration
$40.77+	Water base rate	Monthly base rate + Water usage volumetric rate: Water volumetric rates (per 1,000 gallons) 0 – 2,000: $3.93 2,001 – 4,000: $4.97 4,001 – 8,000: $6.98 8,001 – 15,000: $9.76 15,001 or more: $13.42
$30.06+	Sewer base rate	Monthly base rate + Wastewater usage volumetric rate: $6.61 (per 1,000 gallons)
$39.21	Rate Case Surchage – water	Money spent defending sustainable rates 2020-23 (overturned by PUC).
$39.21	Rate Case Surchage – waste water	Money WOWSC spent defending sustainable rates 2020-23 (overturned by PUC)
-$75.62	Refund	PUC-ordered “refunds” or “credits” to current customers for legal fees inserted in base rates from 2020-23. The PUC said the legal fees should have been levied as surcharges.
$12	Anser – water	Anser is the temporary manager assigned by the PUC. We will see this on the December bill
$12	Anser – waste water	Anser is the temporary manager assigned by the PUC. We will see this on the December bill, for those with waste water connections
$126.80	Estimated Total for next bill	This is what you are likely to see at the end of December, depending on your consumption of water and sewage services in the first two lines.

The simple fact is that the $78.42 we will be paying in surcharges will be transferred/paid monthly (or should be transferred, by PUC order) to the Lloyd Gosselink Law Firm. The Board has not sent our prior payments to LG since April, and the corporation owes them about $70,000, in addition to another larger amount that is being amortized over 3+ years.

(Meanwhile, the WOWSC Board has been paying its new law firm, the Carlton Group, as detailed below, possibly from reserves and loan money. Not sure on that but they have been paid.)

That $78.42 being paid to LG will not do anything for the infrastructure of the company.

As a reminder, the Ratepayers protested a rate increase of $65.73 per month in 2020. So the cost of the company to defend against their protest is now $14 more per month than the original rate increase.

We all would have been better off if the Ratepayer Protest had not been put in motion by the Ratepayer Representatives and their rump group of members. The 2023 Board won a large case against the insurance company, and gained $678,000 such that all the old legal bills (except for the PUC defense) have been paid off. The 2020 Board had promised to reduce rates once all the legal expenses had been paid off. That happened. The Ratepayer Representatives did not care — they wanted to burn everything down to get a judgment, just like the plaintiffs in the underlying land sale case that netted only $35,000 for the corporation after a combined $2 million in legal fees.

Lloyd Gosselink is the firm that won the rate case for WOWSC with the Administrative Law Judges, only to see the Commissioners reverse their decision, setting a precedent that has driven the corporation towards insolvency. The WOWSC Board of 2023 (Gimenez, Nelson, Schaefer, Taylor) was correct in warning the PUC Commissioners that the rates suggested by the PUC Staff would bankrupt the corporation. Since March of this year, the PUC has set rates that have brought WOWSC to the brink of insolvency. Sadly, the 2023 Board was correct and complete financial annihilation has occurred.

For the record, the 2024 Board fired Lloyd Gosselink in March 2024. That Board was comprised of Julie Neumann, Judy Miller, Patti Flunker, Jeff Walker, and Rene Ffrench. Neumann and Flunker resigned at the end of that meeting, and Miller resigned the next day. Most people don’t know these little tidbits of history. Firing legal counsel that won prior WOWSC cases somehow made sense to those Board members.

But back to the point: The Con Man deals in smears of all current and past Board members. It’s his shtick: he uses misapplied misunderstandings of legal processes to deceive his followers through outrageous claims.

As Mark Twain is often quoted, “It is easier to be bamboozled than to admit you’ve been bamboozled.”

Eventually, when this neighborhood continues to pay the bills caused by the Con Man and his spouse, there will be a reckoning of the bamboozlement.