VASSALBORO — Some nights, Linda Richards cries herself to sleep.

Richards, 75, lives alone on a monthly Social Security check. Her sewer bill has tripled in the past few years, and she can no longer afford it, or much of anything else.

“Every time I get my check, I try to think how I can rob Peter to pay Paul,” Richards, a 50-year resident of her Vassalboro home, said. “It’s just awful, especially for me by myself.”

Richards pays as much as she can to the Vassalboro Sanitary District, but she’s behind. She’s been fighting off liens placed on her property for unpaid bills for years now. Her sewer rates keep climbing — her bill is about $460 every three months — but her income isn’t growing.

The sanitary district, a quasi-municipal private company that provides sewer services to about 200 of Vassalboro’s 4,000 residents, is in financial crisis. A rotating cast of board members has repeatedly raised rates on customers to pay for a costly mandated sewer line upgrade that left the small district with more than $3 million in loans to pay back.

Residents along the sewer line, including Richards, are now in financial crises of their own.

Most district customers now pay more for their sewer bills than for their property taxes. Many are behind more than a year on their bills and dozens have liens on their property. At least two have lost their homes to foreclosure because of missed payments.

For the district, which recently nearly defaulted on a loan and spent more than a month without a single sitting board member, the long-term path forward isn’t clear.

For residents afraid to open their sewer bills every three months, they believe the only path forward is with help from their neighbors.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Tim Connelly arrived at the Vassalboro Sanitary District’s August meeting, frustrated.

Board members had proposed raising rates again. He’s lost count of how many rate increases he’s faced since 2018.

Connelly owns 10 properties along the sewer line and has increased rents on his tenants to keep pace with his sewer bill.

“Every time I get an increase, I’ve got to do it to all my tenants, and it’s not fair,” Connelly said. “Of course, when they move, I’m gonna have a hard time filling (them) because my rents are gonna be so much higher. The landlord can’t recoup this — and of course, it goes right onto the tenant. You want affordable housing? It ain’t happening.”

The district proposed a 7% increase on rentals and businesses and 4.5% on homes, he said. Each property hooked up to the sewer line pays a minimum of about $230 per quarter.

“My gas prices went up and electric prices went up, taxes went up — everything’s going up,” Connelly said. “Now you want to add 7%? I’m paying thousands of dollars for a sewer bill when my water bill is like $80 or $90. It’s just crazy.”

With dozens of customers behind on their bills, the sanitary district has brought in less guaranteed revenue; its only recourse is further rate increases.

District officials have also justified the increases by pointing to passed-on costs from Winslow — which has also increased fees on the sanitary district — and increased operational costs.

Vassalboro resident Tara Karczewski-Mitchell said board members discussed at the August meeting whether they would have enough money for a $48,000 Oct. 1 payment to the Maine Municipal Bond Bank for one of the district’s loans. If the district couldn’t afford the payment, it would default.

“Why don’t we just default?” Karczewski-Mitchell asked board members, exasperated. “What would happen if we defaulted?”

She didn’t expect the board’s answer: One provision of state law allows the bank to seize personal property within the district, including real estate, to satisfy the loan.

“Essentially, every piece of property within the district has been pledged as collateral for the repayment of the loans,” Mary E. Costigan, the district’s attorney, said in a September letter.

“I can buy a piece of property, be paying on it, not be in debt or overdue on any of my bills, including my sewer bill — and to think that somebody could come in when nobody asked us for permission to use our homes as collateral,” Karczewski-Mitchell said. “It’s really scary.”

A 2024 report by consultant RCAP Solutions commissioned by the sewer district found an annual sewer bill of $1,500 was “unaffordable” for most families in Vassalboro based on the town’s median income. The average household’s bill in the sewer district is closer to $2,500 annually.

The district’s 200 residents are largely not making as much as their neighbors. Karczewski-Mitchell said a high proportion of the homes on the sewer line are owned by residents on low or fixed income, whose homes are their largest source of wealth.

Richards, for instance, pays more than 15% of her income on her sewer bills.

Sewer bills in the Vassalboro Sanitary District are based on water usage, unless customers have a secondary meter to measure the amount of water flowing into the sewer line.

Richards has stopped showering as often and avoids running her dishwasher more than once a week. She’s heard of neighbors, a family of five, who can’t afford to bathe their children at all.

Several homeowners in the district are saving rainwater — a tactic thwarted by Maine’s ongoing drought.

Richards said her community’s situation sometimes feels hopeless.

“I’m trying to cut down on my water for nothing — because I still can’t afford the sewer bill,” Richards said.

At the end of the August meeting, Karczewski-Mitchell said she would reach out to newspapers in the area to demand accountability.

By mid-August, each member of the board had tendered their resignation.

UNAVOIDABLE OR IRRESPONSIBLE?

In March 2015, the Vassalboro Sanitary District board voted unanimously to replace three sand filter treatment sites with a connection to the Winslow sewer system.

The infrastructure at the three sites — two in North Vassalboro and one in East Vassalboro — were frail. Each site discharged treated sewage into Outlet Stream, violating Maine Department of Environmental Protection phosphorous regulations. The new project would pump the sewage from Vassalboro to Winslow, and then to Waterville, where it would be treated by the Kennebec Sanitary District.

The move was a responsible one, district and town leaders said at the time, brushing off resident concerns of skyrocketing rates.

“I promise you, this won’t be built unless it can be affordable,” Norton True, of Hoyle, Tanner & Associates, the engineering firm that designed the project, said during a March 2015 presentation.

Initially, the upgrade was expected to cost just over $5 million, raising average rates from between $480-$600 per year to $600-$1,000 per year, close to the state average. Some estimates suggested costs would go down for Vassalboro residents.

By its completion in 2020, though, the project cost about $8 million, including over $3 million in loans from the Maine Municipal Bond Bank and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development program.

Then-Town Manager Mary Sabins said the project’s completion put “the town in a good position going forward.”

Many residents weighed down by unaffordable bills disagree.

“I have worked my ass off for years, paying this house off so I would have a place to live as an old, blind woman,” Richards said. “And now I could lose my house to a friggin’ sewer bill?”

Paying down debt is now the district’s largest expense, at $155,911 in 2025. The bills are also many customers’ biggest expense.

Megan McDonough’s sewer bill is about $2,800 per year; her horses drink several gallons a day, and without an additional meter to measure water that does not flow into the sewer system, she pays the sewer rate for all her water usage. She said she’s asked about installing that second meter, but has received little information from the sewer district about how to do so.

A lack of communication has been a common struggle, several residents said; Becky Goodrich, the district’s only employee, is often unavailable. Office hours are limited. The district’s website has not been updated in months.

McDonough lives alone and was planning to renovate her farmhouse to include a second unit to rent out, but has halted those plans.

“Do I sell my home of 23 years?” McDonough said. “I think everybody’s just kind of at a loss.”

A VACANT BOARD

The August resignations — the latest round in a long history — left the Vassalboro Sanitary District without a quorum, meaning no business could be conducted. Finding residents interested in serving on the board is difficult, too. It took more than a month for town officials to find even one volunteer.

For once, Richards felt at peace. She stopped receiving notices that she was behind on her bills.

But the lack of a quorum put the district in a bind. Without a body to approve payment to the Maine Municipal Bond Bank, the district could default, triggering the seizure of homes in the district.

Goodrich asked the Vassalboro Select Board for advice during its Sept. 18 meeting. The money was available — barely — but she didn’t feel she had the authority to spend it.

Ron Smith, the auditor for both the district and the town, said he was confident Goodrich could make the payment regardless, and would be open to working with her to find long-term financial solutions.

Goodrich made the payment, the check cleared and the select board recruited three new members to join the board — Jenna Davis, Lauchlin Titus and Raymond Breton — constituting a quorum.

But the long-term financial problems are yet unsolved. Smith will meet with the select board in November at the Vassalboro Town Office to discuss the district’s long-term finances.

The 2025 budget approved by Vassalboro Sanitary District board members predicts a $95,000 end-of-year deficit, and it’s unclear if the district will be able to make its loan installments next year — an $11,000 payment to the bond bank in April and a $72,000 payment to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development program in July. The district’s lines of credit are nearly full. Payments to the town of Winslow are late.

If the Vassalboro Sanitary District declared bankruptcy to escape from the loans, its credit rating would plummet, and the district may never be able to borrow money again without “astronomical” interest rates, then-board member Donna Daviau said earlier this year.

“All we’re doing is kicking the can down the road,” Vassalboro Select Board chairperson Rick DeNico said during the Sept. 18 meeting.

Goodrich did not respond to several requests for comment. DeNico declined comment.

NEIGHBORLY SOLUTIONS?

DeNico and other Select Board members have appeared open to a town-level solution. He proposed using town Tax Increment Financing funds to avoid default in September and Select Board member Christopher French suggested the town write a letter to affected residents at the board’s Oct. 2 meeting.

Neither proposal came to fruition, but talk of town intervention is a step in the right direction many Vassalboro Sanitary District customers say.

Every other option has been exhausted, McDonough said.

A bill proposed last spring by Sen. Richard Bradstreet, R-Vassalboro, would have offered $2 million in state relief, but it was shot down in committee. Rep. Melanie Sachs, D-Freeport, the chair of the Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee, said providing direct relief was not “the right vehicle or the right precedent to be setting.”

The Maine Public Utilities Commission does not regulate sewer districts that aren’t affiliated with municipalities and the grassroots organizers can’t afford to pay an attorney to litigate, nor do they want to.

McDonough and Karczewski-Mitchell have previously attempted to petition the town to take on the district’s debt, but town staff found the petition format to be invalid, Karczewski-Mitchell said.

The district itself became an independent private company in 2017, and any move to fully merge with the town of Vassalboro may require an act of the state Legislature — a tall task, but one McDonough, Karczewski-Mitchell and others said may be necessary in the next several years.

The town may take on some of the district’s debt, but having only 200 ratepayers is not sustainable, McDonough said.

“We can’t absorb any more cost on our end,” McDonough said. “So that has to change — the base that’s assuming the financial obligation has to be extended to the entire municipality of Vassalboro, or we can’t pay. We can’t carry the debt ceiling.”

If the other 3,800 residents of Vassalboro also took on the responsibility for paying back the loan, a 2024 report found that tax bills would increase only by about $88 per year for each property.

Vassalboro officials have financially backed the sewer district before; the town has provided more than $1.7 million to the district over its existence, between TIF funds, American Rescue Plan Act money and other grants.

“There needs to be a come to the table moment,” resident Jennifer Reed said. “Four thousand people need to get together and say, ‘My neighbors over here are suffering.'”

Richards thinks that approach makes sense.

She pays her property taxes — on time — for the school system, even though her children graduated decades ago. So, she said, there’s no reason other Vassalboro residents couldn’t help her.

Until then, she’ll shower once a week, clinging onto ownership of her lifelong home.