OPINION - The Service Authority: A Counterpoint

by Sean Gates

Project94 was founded on principles.  Among these is the idea that the press should be as objective as possible, and that opinion should clearly be labeled as such.  With that said, I'm also a big believer in balance, and from the beginning I think the four of us who founded Project94 wanted to represent King George and its people in the most comprehensive way.  Perhaps on subjects where objectivity may be difficult to maintain, a variety of viewpoints will have to suffice.  So while I will attempt to be as objective as possible here, I cannot entirely guarantee that my point of view won’t creep in.

My views are primarily libertarian, meaning that I favor the individual over the organization, and I am suspicious not only of authority but of pulpits; whenever a reporter uses their position to further a narrative rather than reporting simple facts in evidence and giving both sides a fair shake, comparing the stories with observable reality, and allowing transparency for the reader to see how the journalist reaches his or her conclusions, well, I experience something akin to physical pain. 

But I also understand that humans are not the rational creatures we believe ourselves to be.  We all believe that facts are persuasive, because they are observable and measurable, but facts rarely convince people of anything.  This is because people usually accept only facts that support their point of view, and reject the ones that don’t.  And that’s true regardless of their political views or anything else.  There’s even a fancy name for it: confirmation bias.

This is why Cathy Dyson can interview Christopher Werle, the Chairman of the King George County Service Authority Board of Directors, and omit several salient points of testimony.  They simply don’t tell her anything she wants to hear, and so she rejects them as false or irrelevant.  It’s a kind of hallucination, and everyone suffers from it sometimes.  I suffer from it every time I try to read one of her articles on any subject at all: emphasis on the suffering.

So I won’t try to claim that I’m objective here, but I will attempt to be fully transparent about how I reach my conclusions, and I will keep my talking points brief and succinct.  Also, to be sure that Mr. Werle’s entire testimony is available to you should you wish to read it, I will be including with this article the full text of his statements from the Service Authority Board meeting this past Tuesday night.  You can’t get much more transparent than that.  Not only that, but I’m not going to ask you take Mr. Werle at his word.  I’m going to put his comments up against the timeline of the documents from the DEQ, the County, and the Service Authority, as compiled by my colleague Neil Richard through a series of FOIA requests.

So let’s deal with some facts.  In the first place, I imagine we can all agree that the Service Authority has an obligation to provide clean, safe water to its customers.  That, in fact, has to be the entire purpose of the organization.  So the fact of the problems with the system, the Notices of Violation from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, and General Manager Chris Thomas’s failure to resolve the problems or communicate with the DEQ at all for a period of about two years, is likewise something we can all agree is a serious problem.

But let’s be clear: these problems started in 2015, and at that time the King George County Board of Supervisors did double-duty as the Service Authority Board of Directors.  However, the relationship was sort of incestuous, because the Service Authority is a separate entity from the Board of Supervisors, and even Cathy Dyson’s article mentions that fact.  This means that the Service Authority is likely under no obligation to report problems to the Board of Supervisors unless they’re asking for money or other assistance. 

The fact that the Board of Supervisors did not know about the violations dating back to 2015 proves that Chris Thomas didn’t bother to notify them.  In January of 2017 the Board of Supervisors decided to appoint a citizen to the Service Authority Board, and that was Mr. Werle.  A year later, in January 2018, a second citizen, Mike Bennett, was also appointed.  The other three members of that body are still members of the Board of Supervisors.  It seems reasonable, therefore, to assume that Chris Thomas kept his previous pattern of not telling anybody about the Notices of Violation from the DEQ.

Now, Cathy Dyson’s article notes that in 2017, after not hearing back from Mr. Thomas since 2015, the DEQ made an end-run around Thomas and reached out to Mr. Werle.  In fact, Neil Richard’s research supports that timeline.  He tells me that on June 13^th, 2017 the DEQ emailed Chris Werle about the violations. In his prepared statement during the Service Authority Board Meeting on June 5^th, 2018, Mr. Werle said:

“Upon learning about the non-responsiveness issue from Ms. Johnson at DEQ, I immediately discussed it at some length with Mr. Thomas, who confirmed that he had in fact stopped responding to what he felt was an unwarranted increase in inspections by the regional office inspectors. 

“During our discussion, I told Mr. Thomas that he could not just stop responding to regulators, I strongly suggested that he start doing so immediately, and that he also get caught up on all outstanding responses.  Mr. Thomas did so, and has continued to do so ever since.”

Werle’s statement is supported by the timeline emerging in Neil’s research.  On June 16^th, 2017, three days after the email from the DEQ to Mr. Werle, Chris Thomas contacted the DEQ, and by July 7^th had at last begun following up on the inspections and NOV’s dating back to 2015.  The fact that Thomas, who had simply ignored the communications from the DEQ for nearly two years, finally started responding to them corroborates Werle’s statements. 

Now remember, because the Service Authority and the Board of Supervisors are separate entities, at least on paper, the Service Authority is not beholden to the Supervisors.  This means the fact that neither Chris Thomas nor Chris Werle brought the series of Notices of Violation from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to the attention of the Board of Supervisors is, in fact, not a crime.  Since it’s not a crime, the only real issue is the quality of the water and the prolonged silence from Mr. Thomas.  It appears to me from the facts in evidence that Mr. Werle acted swiftly and decisively and whatever he said to Mr. Thomas was apparently an effective motivator.

 So why didn’t Mr. Werle notify the Board of Supervisors?  Well, of course I can’t read minds.  But since Mr. Werle appears to be a rational actor and not a moustache-twirling supervillain, from what I can see, I would surmise that he felt it would cause undue panic.  In his statement of the night of June 5^th, 2018, Mr. Werle said of the health concerns:

“[Dyson’s] article notes that too much nitrogen being released from a WWTP can kill fish and other aquatic life.  That is true, and it is also true that from time to time our plants have released nitrogen and other nutrients, such as phosphorous, in levels exceeding permitted limits.  However, none of those releases were at levels that would cause serious harm to human health or the environment.  In fact, total nutrient releases from our plants are well below the limits set forth in our Chesapeake Bay General Permit; so low actually, that we earned nutrient credits that we then sold to other parties to generate additional KGCSA revenue.”

Can the nutrient releases be above the limits allowed by the DEQ but fall well below the limits set forth in the Chesapeake Bay General Permit?  Probably.  Having been a food service manager at one point in my life, I had to be certified by the National Registry of Food Safety Professionals.  Every time you eat out at a restaurant, or buy prepared food from a supermarket, gas station, or drive-thru, you put your life in the hands of that clerk behind the counter.  One false move and he could give you a potentially fatal foodborne illness. 

Because of this, my employer’s standards were actually stricter than the law required.  It isn’t that there was anything wrong with the law.  It’s that my employer knew that equipment fails, people fail, and systems fail.  So the stricter your regulations are, the less likely a small violation is to pose a serious health threat.  I would suspect that the DEQ operates on much the same principal.  Likely this explains why they let Mr. Thomas get away with ignoring them for nearly two years instead of blowing up the phone of every county official, the EPA, and the CDC to boot. 

As Mr. Werle went on to say, in the future some guidelines ought to be set down regarding how much information the Board of Supervisors expects to receive from the Service Authority, and the Chairman of the KGCSA BOD should be briefed on what the expectations are for his or her position.  But as it stands, Werle did nothing against the law and I see no reason to think that his intentions weren’t noble in the actions he took.  After all, he uses the same water the rest of us do.

Another thing I feel that I should mention: I have heard from another source that many of the specific facts and figures mentioned in Ms. Dyson’s article were only ever discussed by the Board in closed session.  This means that someone on the Board of Supervisors leaked the information to Cathy Dyson.  This will come as no surprise to any thinking person who reads the Free Lance-Star’s attempts to “cover” King George County, but Cathy Dyson isn’t an objective party.  Like most modern journalists, she writes persuasively to advance her agenda but doesn’t offer a balanced look.  Consider this the counterpoint.

Christopher Werle did his job.  What this is really about is the King George County Board of Supervisors jockeying to take control of the Service Authority.  Cathy Dyson’s article as much as says it right in the headline.  Maybe you don’t have a problem with that, but for a governing body to walk all over a citizen appointee to achieve that end would be authoritarianism at its worst.  For any reporter to be a party to it is sheer propagandism.  I think I’ll pass.