Old water battle spills over

Resident was charged $1,800 for 3 months of usage in 2001

SHIRLEY » A resident who attended Monday night’s Board of Selectmen meeting via Zoom came seeking the board’s help to settle a decades-old dispute with the town’s Water Department.

Selectman Debra Flagg put the discussion on the agenda hoping a water commissioner would attend to address the issue, but none did.

While Selectmen Debra Flagg and Bryan Sawyer noted that their board doesn’t have jurisdiction over the Water Department, which is an independent entity, Flagg said the district has been amenable to cooperative efforts before.

The resident, Lauren MacCarthy, said the problem dates back to 2001, when the Sewer Department was installing lines and blasting with dynamite near her home on Center Road. She was mostly out of town at the time but told selectmen she believes

the jarring blasts skewed her water-meter reading, causing a shockingly high water bill — $1,800 for one quarter — that she has been battling ever since.

“The bill was 40 times too high,” she said.

Now, 20 years later, the Water Department posted a notice on her door, warning that service would be discontinued unless the overdue amount for that period is paid. In her view, that’s an odd call in the middle of a pandemic.

She told the board that the governor’s emergency orders regarding public utilities don’t apply here and that state agencies have confirmed that as an independent municipal department, the Water Department is exempt from a statewide moratorium on utility shutdowns.

“They’re threatening to turn off my water,” she said, adding that with a steam

heating system, she’d also be without heat.

MacCarthy also took issue with the Water Department’s billing practices, which she said are also not subject to state oversight. Unlike other town departments, the municipal water district “can’t be made accountable.”

After first being told she could not view past bills, she said she was finally allowed to review the records at the district’s office, but she wasn’t satisfied with the information she got that way and printouts were difficult to decipher.

While she said the billing issue has been settled, the underlying problem was not addressed.

In a phone interview Tuesday, MacCarthy described the problem in detail, including the overly high amount of the bill and the Water Department’s unsatisfactory response to her complaints, including a former commissioner’s odd explanation on how such a huge bill could have accrued.

She said the former commissioner be

lieved she must have been filling a pond on her property with water from a hose, as a previous owner had done, but she denied ever doing that.

And although the $1,800 she was erroneously told she owed has since been forgiven, she said she wasn’t granted a hearing to discuss the overdue bill.

At one point, MacCarthy said, she considered filing suit in Small Claims Court and even contacted state Sen. James Eldridge and state Rep. Dan Senna.

Although she no longer faces an imminent shut-off of water to her home, MacCarthy believes others in town may have similar problems.

“There’s no consumer protection,” she said. “That’s bananas!”

Contacted for comment Tuesday, Water Commissioner Ann Towne confirmed that the matter has been resolved as far as the Water District is concerned. But she wanted to set the record straight on some of the points MacCarthy raised at the selectmen’s meeting, saying “there are two sides to every story.”

For starters, the commissioners didn’t know selectmen planned to take up MacCarthy’s complaint Monday night, and it had already been resolved by then anyway.

“We were never notified that we were on the agenda,” Towne said, adding that she would have attended but would prefer to wait until an in-person meeting.

In regard to MacCarthy’s complaint, Towne said, “The Water District treats all of its users the same” in terms of their responsibility for metered use of own water, she said, and in MacCarthy’s case there was no reason to question the metered amount.

She added that despite the notice left on MacCarthy’s door, she was never at risk of losing her home’s water supply during the pandemic.

“We haven’t shut anybody off,” she said.

She also said MacCarthy’s claim of a lack of fiscal oversight was “false information,” citing federal loans that require annual, independent audits.