Setting the Record Straight: Fair Water Texas in the Current Aqua Texas Case and Actual Facts about the WOWSC Rate Case of 2020-2024

Recent posts on NextDoor have repeated several inaccurate claims about my involvement in Windermere Oaks matters and about Fair Water Texas.

Normally, I do not engage with online commentary — most of us have better things to do than monitor and continually respond to ginned up neighborhood disputes — but the volume and persistence of misinformation have created confusion for people who understandably assume frequent posting equals accuracy and care for the community. It does not.

Over the years, a small group of individuals has used NextDoor, YouTube, emails, and websites to criticize neighbors, especially those who volunteer to serve on Boards. Many of us — Julie Naumann, Jeff Walker, Mark Carpenter, Brian Garceau, Dana Martin, Bill Earnest, and others — have at some point been the target of these narratives, or are in the process of being targeted. The pattern is familiar: personal attacks, repeated claims, and selective presentation of facts.

I try not to take these attacks personally, nor do I spend much time responding to them. But when misinformation affects the community’s understanding of important issues — such as the WOWSC rate case or the current Aqua Texas proceeding — it becomes necessary to correct the record. What follows is a factual response to several claims made in recent posts, supported by the actual findings of the Administrative Law Judges, the Public Utility Commission, and the documented history of litigation involving WOWSC.

1. What Judges in the State Office of Administrative Hearings (SOAH) Actually Found in the WOWSC Rate Case of 2020-2024.

The Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) spent three years reviewing testimony, documents, hearings, and legal filings in the rate appeal of Windermere Oaks rate protestors against the Windermere Oaks Water Supply Corporation Board of Directors, of which I was the Board President in 2020, and from 2019-2023 in all. The findings of Judges Siano and Wiseman in 2023 are continually misrepresented by the ConMan, as he has chosen instead to focus on the Public Utility Commissioners’ decision to overturn precedents in that case. Here’s what the Judges found after years of involvement and hundreds of filings:

It was reasonable for the WOWSC Board to include outside legal expenses in base rates that the Board set in January 2020.
However, the WOWSC Board failed to offset its revenue requirement with other revenues (late fees, standby fees) that were part of its overall income.
Because of that accounting error, the ALJs recommended granting a portion of the ratepayer appeal by resetting the rates to what the Board should have set if it included those income streams. It was basically about $50,000 if I recall correctly. It was a very small offset and left most of the 2020 Board’s rate increase intact.
The ALJs recommended awarding WOWSC’s rate‑case expenses as reasonable.
The Judges noted what the Board said, that they would reduce the rates that included litigation costs when appropriate, because the Board members were volunteers and ratepayers themselves in the non-profit corporation that is WOWSC.

Here is a direct quote from the Proposal for Decision written by Judges Siano and Wiseman:

“The ALJs find that it was reasonable for Windermere to include the outside legal expenses in base rates, but that it failed to properly offset the revenue requirement with other revenues.”

This is nothing like the ConMan’s continuing false claims that the PUC declared the rate increase “unjust, unreasonable, and not in the public interest.” (For those unfamiliar with my use of the term ConMan, you could read here, here, and here)

2. What the Commission Actually Decided in Partially Over-Ruling the Judges (Commissioner Cobos Memorandum)

The Commissioners on the Public Utility Commission of Texas reviewed Siano’s and Wiseman’s Proposal for Decision and partially rejected the ALJs’ reasoning — but not in the way the ConMan suggests in his continuing false light narratives. Here is what the Commission actually found:

A. WOWSC failed to carry its burden of proof.

Not because the board acted improperly — but because the board did not provide enough evidence of the revenue requirement and rate design used to set the appealed rates. (This will be discussed further below relating to the Texas Rural Water Association’s involvement in that rate-setting process.)

B. The appealed rates were not in the public interest.

Specifically because WOWSC did not demonstrate how it calculated the rates it set for 2020 — not because the board acted maliciously or irrationally.

C. Only $3,000 in legal expenses should have been included in base rates for 2020 and beyond.

The Commission held that extraordinary litigation costs — the ones that were caused by plaintiffs Dick Dial, Bruce Sorgen and Rene Ffrench in cases noted below — should have been recovered through a temporary surcharge, not permanent base rates.

(In my opinion, they got this wrong — the 2020 Board explicitly stated on the record in public meeting that rates would be lowered once litigation ended. The rates were not “permanent.” As mentioned, the ALJs acknowledged the Board’s statement, noting how rate-paying volunteer Board directors, like myself, had every incentive to reduce rates of the non-profit corporation. At the time the Board upped the base rates, a surcharge mechanism was not part of the WOWSC Bylaws.)

D. WOWSC should recover its 2019 legal debt through a 12‑month surcharge.

This part of the Commissioners’ ruling made no sense. A surcharge mechanism did not exist. They believed that, in 2023, the rates should be rolled back to what they were in 2019, so as to preserve WOWSC’s financial integrity at the time the rates were set.

(This was probably the most disastrous ruling in PUC history. How is it good public policy to set a public utility on a path toward insolvency when warned about that likelihood? The Commission in 2023 ignored the Board’s warning about the disastrous effects this would have on WOWSC, especially after the 9% roaring inflation set off by Covid in 2020. The Commissioners ignored WOWSC real-time business environment analysis that the company would become financially insolvent after only 10 months using the rates calculated by PUC Staff, led by Staff Attorney Merritt Lander. It actually only took 6 months. It was no wonder to me that bureaucrats unfamiliar with the real effects of business inflation would ignore reality. If there is anyone who “sank” the WOWSC, it was Commissioner Cobos and PUC Staff Attorney Merritt Lander.)

E. WOWSC must refund over‑recovery to ratepayers.

The Commissioners also decided that, because the revenue requirement should have been lower according to Merritt Lander and her crew, WOWSC customers who’d paid the 2020 base rates should receive refunds from the WOWSC.

(I partially agree with that decision. Refunds were in order because the WOWSC, in 2023, received a check of $679,000 from the Allied World Insurance company. WOWSC had taken Allied World to court for breach of contract of their insurance policy. It was a huge win for this neighborhood. That money was for the legal fees WOWSC incurred for the volunteer Board directors who were sued by Sorgen, Ffrench and Dial. Board members are owed funding for a legal defense under Texas Business Code Chapter 8 when sued in service to their business. The 8 volunteer directors, including myself, were covered by this insurance policy, but all agreed that, if found individually guilty of a criminal activity, we would repay the company for our legal fees. That is standard operating procedure for Board members of all corporations and other entities across Texas and even the United States. None was ever found guilty of criminal activity and only one was found in district court to have breached fiduciary duty, a civil violation of law.

However, I will say that the Public Utility Commission demonstrated their animosty toward the volunteer by NOT considering the impact of the fees on rates. They were asked to do so by the Ratepayer Representatives and they were unopposed by the WOWSC in late 2023. This was after I was on the Board. It is hard to read the Commission’s inaction in any other way. The fix was in at the PUC — punish WOWSC!)

F. WOWSC may recover its rate‑case expenses.

The Commission adopted the ALJs’ recommendation to allow recovery of $478,184.04 in rate‑case expenses. Those were the fees paid to attorneys at the Lloyd Gosselink law firm representing the WOWSC in the rate case that had been brought by Patti Flunker and Josie Fuller, the so-called ratepayer representatives.

Let’s focus on that $478,184.04. The ConMan says those were “$1 million” in his NextDoor post. Factually wrong on his part.

After more than four years of having this record, you would normally assume that he would know the real number. But like everything he does, the ConMan just inflates the number for drama — to demean and impugn. That is just one more example of why he is the ConMan of Windermere, but I encourage you to read other posts going back to 2023 about the ConGame that continues to this day.

Anyway, nothing in the Judges’ decision or the Commission’s order supports his narrative that I, Joe Gimenez, “sank” WOWSC or “presided over” some rogue rate increase.

The Commissioners’ decision was a technical ruling about evidence and methodology — not a condemnation of the board’s integrity.

(Besides the paragraph above about the disastrous PUC Staff rates and the Commissioners’ adoption of them, there is another argument about who “sunk” the WOWSC. The Commissioners and Staff were only reacting to the case brought by the Ratepayer Representatives Patti Flunker and Josie Fuller. Their decision to pursue the rate appeal caused customers to incur the $480,000 in rate case legal expenses charged by Lloyd Gosselink. They persuaded Merrit Lander and the Commission to set the unrealistic rates that has forced the company into insolvency. Insolvency means the inability to pay bills, which have been reasons given by at least one law firm and one operating company for quitting their service to WOWSC. Indeed, the company’s own audit of 2024 showed that is lost $271,716 in large part to the rates applied by the Commission in 2024 and sought by Patti Flunker and Joise Fuller. That insolvency forced the corporation Board, of Jeff Walker, Scott Miller and Brian Garceau, to sell six-acres owned by WOWSC for $1.25 million in 2025. They had to, in part, because of payment defaults to Co-Bank, a bank which in 2021 had lent WOWSC about $600,000 at a 3.25 percent rate for a 20-year term. Securing that loan was another great achievement by the Board of 2019-2013. Yet, the disastrous rates urged by Patti Flunker and Josie Fuller and then set by the Commission caused WOWSC to default on its payments in 2024. Without that cash infusion from the sale of the land, the company would be bankrupt.

One final note: during one of the hearings even one of the judges, Siano I believe, remarked on the fact that the rate case legal expenses were, at that time, already twice the amount of the legal fees which the Board had sought to recover in rates. They went on to be about 4 times the amount. The TRWA discussed the rate case expenses in their letter to the Commission.)

3. Why WOWSC’s Legal Expenses Exploded in 2020 and Were Necessary (The Record, Not the Con‑Man’s Con)

The ALJs documented that WOWSC legal expenses jumped from under $3,000 per year to $166,000 in 2019 because of litigation initiated by the small group of people named above, including the ConMan and ConSpouse, beginning in 2017. This is fact described in the PFD of Judges Siano and Wiseman reflecting documents in the rate appeal. The Judge’s PFD laid out the causes for the WOWSC’s rate increase as follows:

Multiple law firms were needed to defend the corporation itself and the volunteer Board directors.
- The TOMA lawsuit brought by Dick Dial, Bruce Sorgen and Rene Ffrench operating as TOMA LLC in 2017-2018 and continuing through 2020 had absorbed significant financial resources from the company.
- The Double F Hangar lawsuit brought in 2019 by Dick Dial, Bruce Sorgen and Rene Ffrench required legal fees.
- The WOWSC’s filing in Travis County District Court to protect the corporation’s ability to retain privileged relations with its law firm against the ConMan’s unlawful requests for information related to privileged matters.
Legal counsel for 46 Public Information Act requests in 2019.
Insurance denial by Allied World (As mentioned, the 2020 Board recovered $679,000 from Allied World in 2023, precisely because they had breached their contract by denying the WOWSC in 2020. Allied World had originally claimed that unlawful criminal acts allowed it to deny coverage. None were found, and they breached their contract because claims against breaches of fiduciary duty were explicitly covered. So even when the ConMan says that the WOWSC Board used base rates to pay for their own legal expenses, he is right, but also wrong in that, later, the Board recovered those legal expenses from Allied World through legal action. The ConMan never mentions that huge victory by the 2020 Board. Being honest about that major victory is not beneficial to the ConMan’s Con so it is always omitted. Omission is a lie. )

4. TRWA’s Rate Analysis and the Board’s Decision

In all candor and retrospective, the WOWSC Board under my leadership made an honest mistake in January 2020. We relied on the free advice and wiggy spreadsheet of the Texas Rural Water Association (TRWA), at the former insistence of Patti Flunker. WOWSC first used this spreadsheet in 2017-18, at the express recommendation of Patti Flunker, who at that time worked for TRWA as a paralegal. She advised WOWSC Boards at many public WOWSC meetings that the WOWSC should use the TRWA rate-setting process/analysis. It did so in 2018 for a rate increase at the time. In 2018, the Con-Spouse did not protest the increased rates to the Public Utility Commission.

Then, in 2020, the Board used the same TRWA spreadsheet. I wish we had not. There are much better advisory companies, like NewGen Strategies, which probably would have done a better job. At the time we did not have the money to pay them because of the above-mentioned TOMA and Ffrench/Dial/Sorgen lawsuits. Nonetheless, TRWA’s spreadsheet analysis showed and recommended that the 2020 WOWSC Board adopt the following:

Revenue requirement: $576,192
Legal expenses: $171,337
Combined water and sewer monthly base rate to customers: $174.59

The 2020 WOWSC board actually rejected that TRWA analysis. It was too HIGH! Instead, we adopted a lower combined base rate of $156.80 per month.

The Commission later recalculated what the board should have set, effectively rejecting the TRWA analysis and recommendation. That recalculation by the PUC did not and should not be interpreted to mean that the board acted improperly. It means the Commission applied a different statutory interpretation of how it should have happened in their ivory tower view of how our Board should have conducted business.

(Their rejection also meant that the TRWA’s analysis was wrong. I’ve heard that the TRWA discontinued provision of that service to its members in roughly 2021, but that is unconfirmed.)

5. Fair Water Texas Did Not “Insert Itself” — It Intervened Formally and Successfully

In his confusing and contrived NextDoor Post, the ConMan then goes on to describe my involvement, doing business as Fair Water Texas, in the current 2026 Aqua Texas rate case affecting water customers in Barton Creek Lakeside as well as thousands of water customers across Texas. By representing Aqua Texas customers across Texas, Fair Water Texas became a named intervenor in Aqua Texas’ attempt to raise rates. Operating as FWT, we:

filed testimony,
cross‑examined Aqua witnesses,
submitted legal briefing,
challenged Aqua’s rate base,
challenged Aqua’s Return On Equity,
challenged Aqua’s operating expenses,
challenged Aqua’s consolidation proposal,
and helped secure millions in reductions.

The ConMan uses the word “inserting” in a pejorative sense, his usual demeaning and impugning style. Mature people understand that FWT is participating in the process— exactly as Texas law allows and encourages ratepayers to do. FWT was and still is involved in this process.

It should not be lost on readers that the ConMan is demeaning my involvement in exactly the same process which his ConSpouse used in Windermere Oaks. Her enduring work in wrecking WOWSC finances also costs ratepayers $39.21 per month, to pay off the $484,000 owed to Lloyd Gosselink.

I formed FWT so that the PUC process would not force another public utility into insolvency, like it has to WOWSC, while also being fair to ratepayers. See the Mission state of FairWaterTexas.org for more info.

6. About the “$2.6 million in attorneys’ fees” the ConMan cites

As usual, the ConMan conflates issues to attempt to throw shade on me and all past Board members of Windermere Oaks by comparing apples-to-oranges and taking matters out of context with reality.

First, he misstates $484,000 as $1 million, then he uses that to try to find linkage to the $2.6 million which Aqua Texas has spent todate on its rate‑case expenses. Those $2.6 million in fees were incurred by Aqua Texas in their rate appeal. They have no relation to WOWSC or Fair Water Texas. That number is mentioned by the ConMan only to demean and impugn Fair Water Texas.

Then, please understand that Aqua Texas’s has 75,000 customers and AT is a statewide Class A utility. Their case has been in existence since May 2025, about 14 months at the time of this writing. The Windermere Oaks rate appeal by Patti Flunker and Josie Fuller, the current Board members, lasted almost 48 months.

In all rate cases, legal fees are allowable expenses that are passed on to customers. In the Aqua Texas case, the ALJs recommended allowing recovery of $5,014,440.40 in rate‑case expenses across Aqua and related SIC proceedings — subject to Commission review. Those are 10x the approximate $500,000 incurred in the three years of WOWSC defense against Patti Flunker and Josie Fuller for WOWSC’s approximate 290customers (when I was on the Board). It’s the same legal process at the Public Utility Commission, whether you are a Class A like Aqua Texas or a non-profit like WOWSC. The PUC process is costly! As previously mentioned, the TRWA noted the outsized expense for a small utility.

Trying to tie Aqua’s legal budget to me personally or Fair Water Texas is just, well, unserious. That is a very accurate word describing most of the ConMan’s NextDoor posts. Yet, that is the Con-Man’s method of operation and standard procedure. He hopes for suckers in Windermere, and now Barton Creek Lakeside, to drink his con Kool-Aid and to become unserious with him.

7. The Aqua Texas PFD Shows Exactly How Fair Water Texas and Other Intervenors Helped Ratepayers across Texas

The ConMan claims he isn’t “exactly sure how” legal fees help ratepayers.

He should ask that question to his ConSpouse, who, as the author of numerous past legal filings against the Windermere Oaks Water Supply Corporation, might be able to instruct him. In addition to aforementioned rate case, she has availed herself of every legal maneuver possible in the PUC process and at district court to litigate against the WOWSC and the Windermere Oaks Property Owners Association.

Like any good con, the ConMan ingratiates himself with unsuspecting neighbors who share antipathy to legal fees. If he were honest about this, he would have serious grievances with his ConSpouse.

Nonetheless, back in real-ville, the state of Texas recognizes that legal fees are necessary for public utilities to navigate in a regulatory environment for monopolies when they seek higher rates. Just like it did for Windermere.

In the Aqua Texas case, in the July 21 Proposal for Decision, the Administrative Law Judges describe a process that has worked in favor of rate payers:

Aqua asked for a $615.9 million rate base. Intervenors helped cut it to $594,944,649.05.
Aqua asked for a 10.60% Return On Equity. Intervenors helped reduce it to 9.18%.
Aqua asked for broad expense recovery. Intervenors helped remove millions in questionable legal, contract, and regulatory costs.
Aqua asked for full consolidation without scrutiny. Intervenors forced a detailed analysis of customer impacts and rate‑design fairness.

These outcomes, if eventually adopted by the Public Utility Commission of Texas, will save ratepayers money every single month going forward.

Fair Water Texas is proud to have played a role in those reductions. But don’t believe me, the ALJs themselves credited intervenors for these reductions.

And Fair Water Texas will continue to advocate for responsible analysis and behavior by Public Utility Staff and the Commissioners, something that was absent in Windermere’s case.

Bottom Line

Several of the ConMan’s NextDoor posts misrepresent:

What the ALJs found in the WOWSC case.
What the Commission decided in the WOWSC case.
What caused WOWSC’s legal expenses
What Fair Water Texas actually did in the Aqua case and how it is not connected to those expenses.

The record shows:

WOWSC’s legal costs came from lawsuits filed by the ConMan’s own group of cronies.
The ALJs found the WOWSC board of 2019-2023 acted reasonably.
The Commission recalculated the rates based on statutory interpretation.
Fair Water Texas has already delivered real wins in the Aqua case.

When the ConMan posts to NextDoor, you should distrust everything he says.