Vassalboro Sanitary District customer Megan McDonough filed a formal complaint late last month to the district’s newly formed board, citing failures to comply with state public access and records law over the past two years.

McDonough, a leader in the customer-led opposition to repeated sewer rate hikes, filed the complaint Oct. 30, asking the district to restore open business hours, post notices of upcoming meetings and designate a public contact person.

The complaint came a day after the first meeting of the district’s board of trustees well over a month ago. The district had operated without a quorum on the board — which is needed to conduct any district business — for about two months.

Even before the most recent board turnover, McDonough wrote in the complaint, district officials have repeatedly failed to return calls from customers asking questions about their skyrocketing bills and have apparently inflated cost estimates for answering public records requests.

That conduct violates Maine law, she wrote. The district has failed to “perform its statutory and charter duties in good faith and with due regard to the public interest,” McDonough wrote.

“There are statutory requirements to conducting business,” she said. “My main draw was like: ‘Guys, you’re a business. Please communicate back a plan as to how you’re going to do business.'”

Before Thursday, the Vassalboro Sanitary District website had not been updated in months. A notice posted on the site said the district would not conduct any business because of a lack of board quorum — even though the Vassalboro Select Board appointed three members to the board in October, and those three members held a public meeting on Oct. 29.

That meeting was noticed to the public via the town’s website, not the sewer district’s. McDonough said she had no idea the meeting was happening and had to watch the recording online.

She had hoped to attend in-person to ask questions, since she had often got no response from the district when calling or emailing. Becky Goodrich, the Vassalboro Sanitary District’s sole employee, does not work out of the district’s office, and hours are limited.

“Over the past two years communication and responsiveness from the VSD has been unreliable at best, with communication ceasing completely within the prior six months,” McDonough wrote in the complaint.

McDonough said customers having answers to their questions is more important now than ever, with the district 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. The 200-customer district has been in a debt spiral ever since, leading board members to triple sewer bills.

“If you want to have an unmanned office, totally reasonable, but at least have a telephone number where we know we can leave a voicemail and a practice of — we call people back on Tuesdays and Thursdays between like, 11 and 1,” McDonough said. “Just some operating practice, so if we need a question answered — a billing question, whatever — that there’s going to be some system of addressing it and getting back to people.”

In the Oct. 29 meeting, several residents said they hoped the website was updated so the quasi-municipal company’s customers could stay updated on the business of the district.

Board members did not respond with immediate urgency.

“I owned a website. It was a waste of time,” newly appointed board chair Lauchlin Titus said, chuckling. “Even I didn’t use it. My clients didn’t use it. I’m a little disenamored, personally, with websites.”

After lengthy discussion, the three newly appointed members, Titus, Ray Breton and Jenna Davies, agreed that “revamping” the website to include meeting videos, minutes and financial documentation was a priority, but the website had not been updated a week after the meeting.

After the Kennebec Journal reached out Thursday afternoon to the Vassalboro Sanitary District to seek comment on the district’s website being updated, the all-caps note that said the board had no quorum and could not conduct business was replaced with a notice of the next board meeting. A link to a recording of the Oct. 29 meeting was also added, as was contact information for the new board members.

Titus, the new chair of the board, said in an email Friday the board had “initiated action on some of the items her complaint references,” including updating the website. Davies, he said, has taken the lead on website updates.

“I know that three of us, two trustees and staff, have responded to Ms. McDonough, within a day of her recent communications to us,” Titus said. “There was NO board of trustees for several months, so no meetings and no staff guidance or support during that time. We look forward to moving the Vassalboro Sanitary District forward in a positive manner. The new trustees are climbing a steep learning curve of knowledge to do this.”

A central part of McDonough’s complaint was a Freedom of Access Act request submitted by Tara Karczewski-Mitchell, a sanitary district customer, in December 2023 for district financial documentation. The district failed to acknowledge that request within five business days, the mandated time required by law, and demanded a $1,700 fee for a week of work to collect the documents. The fee schedules included in the cost estimate also violated the state limit of $25 per hour of work.

Karczewski-Mitchell chose not to pay the fee, and the records were never released.

McDonough made a similar public records request alongside her complaint, asking for records of communication with state regulators about rate increases, board member tenures, meeting minutes and agendas, voting records and contracts with outside financial institutions.

She received a $2,400 bill for 88 hours of work collecting the documents — a time estimate McDonough said appears inflated. Instead of paying the fee, which included $200 for photocopies, she limited the scope of her request to include only an audit for 2024 and two loan agreements.

Justin Silverman, the executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, said the district likely should have provided the easy-to-collect documents — including agendas and minutes — before demanding a fee for the rest of the documents.

“Given the history of this (district) and overcharging residents for public documents, not only should we not be giving the (district) the benefit of the doubt, but the (district) should instead be going out of its way to do whatever it can to provide information to its residents, as opposed to quoting prohibitive fees and withholding documents that could be easily provided,” Silverman said.

Customers in the district are also hesitant to hire attorneys to litigate the public records cases, given the ongoing financial strain of both residents and the district itself.

“The situation here, bigger picture, speaks to a flaw in Maine’s Freedom of Access Act, in that the only recourse is to go to court,” Silverman said. “Not only do requesters not have the ability to pay these unreasonable fees, but they don’t have the ability to pay an attorney to fight these cases for them, either. Ultimately, the public’s left in the dark.”

In-person inspection of documents is always free of charge under Maine law, although that option was not offered .

Titus said the time and cost was calculated by the individual who would be doing the work.

“The request was for documentation of most of the activity of the Sanitary District for more than a decade. This is a lot of material,” he said. “I am new to VSD, and will not second guess the one person who knows the full scope of the information requested,  where it is located, and what it will take to compile it. All the trustees signed the response letter and I am not aware any of us questioned the time estimate.” 

Titus responded to McDonough’s complaint about five hours after it was submitted, and provided the documents in the narrowed public records request within two days.

The Vassalboro Select Board had planned to discuss the district’s ongoing financial crisis with an auditor during its regular meeting at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the Vassalboro Town Office. Auditor Ron Smith canceled the meeting because “he is still gathering data,” Town Manager Aaron Miller told McDonough in an email Friday morning.

Meanwhile, long-term budget concerns grow more dire with each passing month.

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, and payments to the town of Winslow for sewer line usage are late.

The next sanitary district meeting is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. Nov. 17 at the Vassalboro Town Office.