Sign up for your FREE personalized newsletter featuring insights, trends, and news for America's Active Baby Boomers

Newsletter
New

Local Sewer Board Committing Fraud? No One Cares

Card image cap

This is probably Municipal Law but also looking for ideas because I’ve hit a brick wall I feel. Throwaway account for privacy. Not even sure this belongs here so will probably cross post.

I live in the US, in my state I live in County A. We pay our sewer bill to Township B. I live in a very small town and we just kept getting missing in our county for connection to the sewer so the county supervisors got together and decided to put us on Township B’s sewer project about 15 years ago.

So we pay about $150 a month to Township B to pay our sewer bill (no water or garbage, just sewer) . Township B, then is supposed to pay County A for the cost of using County As waste plant. Because we are located in County A, we actually use County A municipal sewer. Our physical sewer lines connect to County A waste plant, but they were put in under Township Bs sewer project so we make payment to Township B. I know it’s confusing without the names-hell even with the names its confusing.

Township B has NOT been paying their fee to County A, which is $5000 a month or so to County A to process the waste since Jan of 2022. They are still collecting our money however. County A has a lawsuit against Township B for back pay and Township B continues to rack up about $600 a month in fees for no payment to County A.

Township B continues to raise our sewer rates to cover this cost, among other things that they accrue costs on-which should have been fixed years ago, like pumps and other stuff. They have also lied ( I have proof) on why they raised our rates the last time.

Other municipalities that are on Township B sewer, at the same time as us, are paying about $85 a month for sewer rates. We, in County A get screwed, well ,because they can. They are at the very least, imo grossly mismanaging money and possible committing fraud.

I have contacted the State Attorney’s Generals office-they have a division that handles utilities-they told me they can’t get involved in local govt matters. They said elect better local officials, but we can’t. We live in County A and have no voting rights in Township B so that’s’ out the window. The sewer board is not under the jurisdiction of the Public Utilities Commission. State representatives do not want to get involved because it’s local government. Contacted the State Inspector General, they don’t look at local govt. I tried to get on the sewer board, but was denied due to not living in Township B, even though we pay them.

Contacted about 45 attorneys, no one is interested in helping us (I know there is a lot of case law against us, but I think we can make a case for unreasonable rates). Contacted local news agencies, no one gives a shit. I can’t believe this sewer board is not accountable to anyone in the state and no one is willing to look into what is going on. I have no idea what to do next. The town residents are mostly older folks and can’t keep paying the increasing costs. Someone is stealing our money. They should have a surplus of about $4000 a month from what they collect from our town, but they are just, I don’t know, stealing it or something and not paying County A-and they just keep incurring more late fees.

I have gathered a lot of information thru Right to Know requests and have a ton of proof to offer to whoever wants it, but no one does.

Does anyone have any ideas on where to go, what to do. Even a different sub to post this in? I’m usually pretty resourceful but I am totally out of ideas here. I just can’t believe there is no agency that oversees this stuff, and that no one gives a shit. Thanks for any help.

submitted by /u/Low_Committee4270
[link] [comments]