EDITOR:
The June 3 Douglas County Commission's 5 p.m. meeting hour was one more chapter in the proposed water district consolidation fraud, complete with a 38-page PowerPoint presentation on the innards of ratemaking. But the nature of the comments during the public input period indicates that this attempt at distraction is not fooling anyone.
County political leaders thought they had come up with a way to wiggle out of the mess created when the county agreed to manage water districts with severe infrastructure problems. They would simply consolidate the ratepaying process of the eight water districts under county management, a shotgun marriage of good and bad districts that would force ratepayers in non-problem districts to pay extra for problems the county foolishly agreed to take on. County Manager Michael Brown has even come up with an irrelevant list of current water district subsidies and taxes as if there was a legitimate precedent to fleece non-problem district ratepayers so that more affluent ratepayers in problem districts could be spared some pain. But the proposed rate increase on non-problem residential and small business ratepayers is much too large to paper over with such nonsense.
When Stuart Posselt's merry band of ratepayer activists started investigating this unfair and illogical "solution," Douglas County's mandarins decided to fling dirt in their eyes by burying them in numbers and bogging them down in process. The subject was supposed to change from the justification for consolidation to the minutiae of rate plans and other chicken entrails. But as Mr. Posselt digs into their numbers, the numbers conveniently change to reflect, supposedly, the flow of public input the commissioners are getting.
If water district consolidation is the right and proper thing to do, why are the commissioners being so coy? They refuse to say where they stand, the excuse being that they're still studying the details. Perhaps the entrepreneurial business people who serve selflessly in non-paying elected office find politics a lucrative enhancement to their business endeavors. Perhaps they didn't realize that this scam would become a political issue. Challengers running for commission seats should make water district consolidation an issue.
Politicians sometimes find a wormhole in the space-time continuum that allows them to fleece their voters and still be re-elected. But that's not likely in this case as more and more non-problem ratepayers enlist in General Posselt's army. Any "yes" votes will convert these ratepayers who gathered petitions objecting to this heist into campaigners who will stir up votes against backstabbing incumbents. That's where the math turns bad for the schemers - there are far more would-be chumps than there are beneficiaries, many of them part-time or absentee owners who can't vote in Douglas County.
The commissioners will hold their next meeting on this topic on the Thursday afternoon at the Tahoe Transportation Center, 169 Highway 50, Stateline. This location should produce more "pro" consolidation attendees that they hope will stiffen the spines of wavering commissioners. But that won't change the vote math.
Lynn Muzzy
Minden
