Editor, OBSERVER:

Don’t be misled my friends, we are the prey: the water customers in the village of Fredonia.

We are being pushed by wildly misguided people to spend a fortune switching our water supply over to an architecture with far more opportunities for service interruptions and failure — instead of giving serious attention to the distribution infrastructure.

To push the idea, they force-fit weak rationale, present clown-level costing figures, and repeat misinformation over multi-media outlets. They point to county staffers with inflated credentials and use selected excerpts from a string of studies prepared by for-profit commercial engineering firms. These people obscure the human factors behind the series of boil-water orders and point blame where it doesn’t belong.

Meanwhile we all watch our water burst from the truly outdated underground system. They don’t want to hear from the water users. They meet in private, and ambush us with badly written resolutions.

It’s not just bad optics. What’s happening is bad. Think about it Fredonia. We have marginally informed politicians, bending to the will of regional politicians. Peel it back and what you find are external financial beneficiaries only. It seems it’s been decided that we are expendable — the red-shirt on a Star Trek away team. Regionally there is no official entity looking out for us. We are all we have.

The Fredonia water system is probably best used in a regional architecture that features interconnects and redundancy. What do these people want to do? Permanently make non-functional, the water-making capability. It’s all about the money.

And make no mistake, it’s your money they want. They are counting on apathy — take that away from them.

ROB CLARK,

Fredonia