From the Desk of Teri Nigretto
Board President
Good afternoon Members and Friends,
– “Why would someone who’s been given a $2,900 Apple laptop also need a $900 iPad?”
This question first appeared in the May 21, 2023 preliminary letter from Acuity Forensics’ Tiffany Couch to then-President Clyde Duke, which arrived about one month prior to her June report titled Eastsound Water Users Association Internal Investigation.
On page 4 of that final report, Couch again cited the purchase of the Apple computer-plus-iPad combination as revealing a “pattern of potentially excessive spending.”
Thus was born iPadGate!
With the onset of RecallWater’s hostile campaign, the iPad question acquired a life of its own, popping up in the pages of the Orcasonian and the unsigned, undated “White Paper” hyperlinked by Michael Riordan and Fred Klein as a “well-researched” documentary of EWUA’s transgressions.
Setting aside for the moment that the $900 price tag was but five one hundredths of a percent of our budget, we were inspired to ask our own stunningly obvious question – why did none of these “investigators” bother to answer the question they had raised? Exactly why did we buy the iPad?
The GIS Mapping Project
GIS (for Geographic Information System) Mapping is an ongoing $15,000 line item in EWUA’s annual capital expenses.
GIS Mapping enables us to create an interactive, real-time map of the GPS coordinates of every customer’s water meter plus underground pipelines and intersections, valves, and other components of our member-owned infrastructure.
Mapping functions are executed by centering a six-foot carbon fiber pole over, for example, a ground-level water meter on a member’s property. A GPS satellite antenna is mounted at the top of the pole, and the pole stands upright on bipod legs.
The GPS antenna is paired with an Apple iPad – yes, the same offending iPad previously detected but not analyzed by Acuity Forensics. The total cost of the hardware kit – including the pole, antenna, battery pack, and parts – was $1,165 plus $974 for the iPad, for a total cost of $2,139.
With the GPS antenna in position, the EWUA operator simply taps on the iPad and the coordinates of the member’s meter are recorded to within a fraction of an inch. (Inset, the iPad display.)
The system is driven by a highly-specialized, subscription-based software package called ArcGIS, which costs about $200 per month. Notably, OPALCO and Rock Island also use their own ArcGIS-based kit for similar infrastructure mapping.
But there is more. After we mapped all 1,200 of our members’ meters, we contracted with Olga and Doe Bay water systems to map theirs – a service for which they each paid EWUA $2,500. Thus, iPadGate earned EWUA $5,000, for a profit of $2,861 (not counting the software) with more to come when we contract with Washington Water for an additional $5,000 to map the Rosario district.
Our operators can now respond to a service need any time of day or night, in a flood or a blizzard, accessing the ArcGIS map on their phone to determine exactly where to dig as needed to start repairs.
The sheer ethical implosion of RecallWater, not to mention Accuity Forensics, in leaving unaddressed the implication that the ArcGIS-equipped iPad was even remotely an example of patterned “excessive spending” would be laughable if it were not associated with the potential for ending the EWUA as a member-owned non-profit water utility.
To keep EWUA under your ownership and control, please vote to remove Jim Claus, Carol Ann Anderson, and Jim Cook from the EWUA board and allow us to continue to serve the community we love.
Thank you for listening,
Teri Nigretto
President
Board President