CRE, Lusby water co. in a tiff

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

In recent months, George Hanson, general manager of the Chesapeake Ranch Water Company and a CRE resident, has written letters to the editor and posted to Internet forums to complain about the CRE board and to allege that he has proof that the CRE board was never legally constituted and therefore should not have most of the authority it possesses now.

In a letter to The Calvert Recorder published June 11, where Hanson made these allegations, he did not sign himself as the company’s general manager or mention the water company.

CRWC is a nonprofit corporation providing water throughout CRE and in some other parts of Lusby.

In response, the CRE board sent a letter June 18 to the water company’s board of directors asking that the water company take steps to rein Hanson in.

‘‘It is our opinion that his recent behavior doesn’t reflect professionalism as befits your organization or his position as general manager. Please make this a topic of conversation at your next meeting and perhaps take him to task for it,” read the letter signed by CRE board Vice President Richard Navickas and approved by a majority of the board.

CRE board President June Mellinger is also on the water company board.

In the letter, the CRE board also asked that Hanson bring his concerns to CRE directors or staff instead of directly to the public, as the board says it has information to rebut his claims that the Property Owners’ Association is illegitimate.

‘‘The forums can be an effective venue for sharing all sorts of information, but for the information discussed in the referenced letter, we believe it isn’t the correct venue for this kind of information transfer,” the letter continued. ‘‘Please consider this letter a neighborly invitation to discuss all the questions and concerns Mr. Hanson, as a property owner and as CWA General Manager and your organization may have with the Property Owners Association of Chesapeake Ranch Estates.”

Navickas did not return a call seeking comment about the letter, but he addressed the issue at a CRE board meeting on Saturday, June 21.

‘‘That individual does no longer speak as the water company,” Navickas said of Hanson. ‘‘This letter requested simply some help from the board of the water company in the future: ‘Please request the member, the general manager, speak directly to the general manager of CRE’s board so he can clarify,’ and once he realizes that information is not correct he would not be putting that information out there.”

This explanation did not satisfy Jackie Beckman, the candidate for the vice presidency of CRE board in the upcoming election.

‘‘You sent it to a member, to his employer, asking them to ‘take him to task’ for what he said on the forums and in the paper,” Beckman said, going on to accuse the board of interfering with Hanson’s free expression.

Hanson, who also challenged the CRE board at that meeting, said in an earlier interview that he believed the letter, which he said was hand-delivered to the water company’s offices by CRE security, was an attempt at ‘‘intimidation.”

‘‘It was an attempt to tarnish my reputation as a professional manager, but that kind of backfired, if anything. If anything else, they’ve brought more attention” to his complaints, Hanson said.

Hanson said he was supported by the water company board. He provided a copy of a letter sent to CRE’s board and signed by water company board President Don Statter.

‘‘A letter from the POACRE Board dated 18 June 2008 was received and reviewed by a quorum of the [water company] board on 19 June. This board does not have the authority to restrict a private citizen’s free speech rights and this matter is deemed irrelevant to water company business,” the letter read in its entirety.

In an interview, Statter called the incident ‘‘a waste of time” because Hanson was speaking as a private citizen when he criticized CRE.

At the June 21 meeting, Mellinger said she stood by the ‘‘board decision [that] a letter of professional courtesy was in order.”

She also acknowledged a history of troubled relations between the CRE board and the water company: ‘‘We do have a problem. They’ve been attacking each other back and forth for years,” she said of the two boards of directors.