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Editor’s note Residents protesting water bills facing eviction in low-income co-op
(16 days later)
This file was inadvertently published. Month after month, bill after bill, year after year, members of the Village Green housing cooperative suspected they were being overcharged for their water. Eventually, in protest, they stopped paying.
Now, they may lose their homes.
The board is trying to evict at least 15 co-op members, citing ignored invoices that total hundreds of dollars per person. The first to get a hearing in landlord-tenant court will be Pat Fletcher, 65, a community activist and the unofficial leader of the protest group, who is scheduled to appear before a judge next week.
What began as a dispute among co-op members has evolved into a nearly two-decade battle that has spawned two investigations by the county’s consumer rights office, one of which is ongoing. The Prince George’s County attorney is seeking a temporary restraining order to halt the evictions until that probe is complete.
Officials, including County Council member Andrea Harrison (D-Springdale), say they are troubled by an initial audit that found $285,000 in excess water charges over a two-year period. The audit also concluded that there is no record that the board returned to its members an additional $60,000 it was refunded because of a separate billing error.
“Because of what appears to be irregular billing practices and operations, the County requests a neutral third party receiver to review the water and sewage billing and accounts at Village Green,” county attorney M. Andree Green wrote in the injunction petition, which accused the co-op board of “clear attempts to circumvent Maryland law.”
Fletcher said she is determined to remain at Village Green, where she and many other people of modest means have lived for decades.
“I know I’m right,” Fletcher said “If people look at what we’ve found, they would know that. If they set me out, I will put up a tent. I am not giving up.”
The townhouses in Village Green Mutual Homes were built in 1968 along Sheriff Road in Landover, part of a federal Housing and Urban Development program for low- to moderate-income families. Shirley Wallace moved there in the early 1970s.
“I was young at the time and had three kids,” said Wallace, 73, a retired administrator with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “It was a good way to have a home and raise my kids in the neighborhood with the school abutting the community.”
Residents of the 231 townhouses are shareholders in the nonprofit cooperative corporation, which paid off its HUD-backed mortgage in 2010. They pay monthly carrying charges that are supposed to cover utilities and shared operating and maintenance costs.
The federal income restrictions that were in place until Village Green paid off its mortgage are no longer mandatory, but most residents are of modest means, including many retirees on fixed incomes. Carrying charges remain low, from $377 to $692 a month.
The co-op’s finances are managed by a five-person board of directors, made up of residents elected annually by the co-op membership. Major financial decisions are supposed to be discussed at monthly membership meetings. The disaffected residents say one family — Mary Williams, her children and her grandson — has played a central role in Village Green operations and governance for more than 30 years.
Williams was site manager of the complex from 1984 until 2014. Her son, David Williams, was board president starting in the 1990s, and was succeeded by his sister, Stephanie Seawright, in 2003, according to documents included in the 2014 investigative report by the Prince George’s Human Relations Commission. Seawright’s son is a maintenance engineer at the complex.
Members of the dissident group say they were declared ineligible to vote in board elections in 2011, because they hadn’t paid their water bills. In 2013, all members were allowed to vote, but the only candidates nominated were incumbents, according to the report by the Human Relations Commission, which investigates consumer complaints. Water-bill protesters said they tried to vote for write-in candidates such as Fletcher, but were told their ballots had been thrown out because they had neglected to place a check next to the names they had written, the report says.
In an interview, Stephen Brown, 59, a former real estate agent who has lived in Village Green since 1972, called the vote “another election that was stolen.”
Neither Mary Williams nor Seawright responded to requests for comment or questions about the co-op’s operations. David Williams died in 2011.
Bernard A. Cook, the board’s attorney, did not respond to residents’ statements about Village Green leadership or questions regarding the elections. But he denied there were problems with how water is billed at the complex, and said that “people who don’t pay cause a deficit for the entire community.”
In 1999, Williams and the co-op board proposed installing sub-meters in each unit to track each household’s water usage. YES Energy Management, a billing company, was contracted to read the meters remotely and send invoices to members.
Cook said residents voted for and welcomed the change because it was supposed to keep their carrying charges low. But investigators with the Human Relations Commission found no documentation showing co-op members had approved the sub-meters, and several residents said in interviews that their carrying charges did not go down.
Soon members realized that their monthly invoices from YES Energy were actually bills that they needed to pay. Their carrying charges no longer covered water and sewer, even though those costs are supposed to be covered, according to the occupancy agreement.
“We actually paid the water bill twice,” said Allena Wesley, a 73-year-old resident.
Cook said members pay YES Energy for their own water use, and that money is reimbursed to Village Green to pay the water bills charged by the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission.
Arnold Brier, an attorney for YES’s parent company, said the company signs confidentiality agreements with its clients that prohibited him from commenting on specific accounts. He said each client works out a different billing system with the company.
In an interview with county investigators in December 2013, Mary Williams said the amount of money collected by YES Energy “rarely matches the actual amount due,” and the carrying charges make up the difference.
Fletcher was the first resident to refuse to pay her water bill, starting in 2000. By 2007, she owed $5,300, and Village Green took her to court. She agreed to pay what she owed to keep from being evicted, and signed an agreement that said all future water and sewer bills “may be considered additional carrying charges/rent.”
But Fletcher now says she regrets signing the document and did not receive good advice from her attorney. She argues that the agreement’s language about future bills is not valid because it conflicts with her original occupancy agreement and, according to co-op bylaws, such changes have to be approved by Village Green corporation members.
“I didn’t agree with it, but I signed it. It was a mistake,” Fletcher said.
By 2013, Fletcher estimates, about 50 co-op members had stopped paying the YES invoices. They sought help from state and local politicians, federal housing officials and even President Obama.
“It appears as though someone or some group has made a bundle off of low- to moderate-income residents,” Fletcher wrote in a June email to the president.
At the urging of County Council member Andrea C. Harrison (D-Springdale), the county launched an investigation that included an audit by Hawi Sanu, who works for the County Council. She found that the WSSC had billed Village Green $256,219.69 in 2012 and 2013. YES Energy billed residents $313,942.14 during the same period. The carrying charges that went to water and sewer costs during that time were $228,000, the audit found. Sanu concluded that Village Green had $541,942.14 to pay the WSSC bills — $285,722.45 more than the utility had charged the cooperative.
And the audit flagged another potential problem. In March 2013, WSSC had refunded Village Green more than $60,000 because of a separate billing error. “The expectation is that the refund would be given back to residents in the form of credits for future bills,” Sanu wrote. But residents say that never happened.
Sanu said the results of her initial review could not confirm wrongdoing or prove that there was none. She recommended a full forensic audit.
Seawright, the co-op president, told investigators the consumer complaint was motivated by personal vendettas against her mother, the report says. She accused Fletcher of sending feces to Williams in the mail to protest how the co-op was being run — an allegation that Fletcher denies.
In September 2013, 10 Village Green residents sued the co-op board, alleging fraud and seeking access to the co-op’s financial records. For nearly two years, the board successfully fought efforts by the plaintiffs to get Sanu to testify. Both sides agreed to a dismissal of the lawsuit in July, after the board told District Judge Hassan A. El-Amin it would explain the water billing to residents in a membership meeting.
But the board’s explanations were unsatisfactory, said Gabriel Christian, an attorney who is representing the residents pro bono. The plaintiffs tried to reopen the case, but Amin denied the motion. The residents have appealed.
The county opened a second consumer-protection investigation in October, and in November the county attorney’s office filed its request for a temporary restraining order.
Fletcher’s eviction hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in Hyattsville District Court.