From the Desk of Teri Nigretto
President, Eastsound Water Users Association
Good evening friends and neighbors.
I am Teri Nigretto, President and Director of EWUA. Most of you know me as Teri.
For just a moment, I would like to step off my director’s platform and give you just a tiny peek into what it is like to be me.
I wake up each day with a target on my back. Or is it crosshairs on my forehead or poison in my veins? You get the idea. It happens because there is one individual – a relative newcomer to our beautiful island community – who devotes each and every one of his many waking hours to making my life as miserable as possible. Why? Because by simply doing my job, I stand in the way of his innermost fervent desire – namely to own or control a public water system.
You know him as Steve Smith, of course. We know him as “Plaintiff.” We also know he is exercising his American right of free speech, and we respect that. Sadly though, Mr. Smith disrespects his own right by trading endlessly in relentless, withering tirades of misinformation, personal attacks, distortion, innuendo, and occasional outright lies – all to clear a pathway for an ownership plan he is not actually telling you about.
But enough about me. We will come back with more another time. Let me introduce Scott Lancaster, former VP and Board Treasurer of Eastsound Water, who served under Smith’s leadership and himself became a target of Smith’s first RecallWater.com campaign.
Scott, you have the floor…
In his own words, Scott Lancaster
In early Oct. 2021, I was serving as VP of Eastsound Water Users Association. I received a phone call from the President of EWUA, Steve Smith, ostensibly to talk about the agenda for our upcoming meeting.
Towards the end of the call, he asked me if I had a few minutes to talk about a very lucrative idea that he was working on. I said I would listen. He said, “you know water is the new oil and I have a plan for us all to prosper from it”.
He then told of his plan to take over EWUA and turn it into an employee-owned company (ESOP) of which he would be 51% owner, but those in on the start would get a piece of the action equal to their input. All I had to do was to support it now with a yes vote when it came before the Board.
I told him I didn’t like the idea and that the membership would never support it. He told me he had a “deep pockets” member who can help to make it so that we could, “make the members an offer they can’t refuse.”
He followed with, “when we have control of EWUA we will have access to low interest loan money to pay back the initial investors.” I told him, “HELL NO – I would not vote for it and in no way support this coup of EWUA.”
He did not speak to me directly about this again. I heard from a friend, later, that he “needed to get Lancaster off the Board.”
This was the beginning of the current turmoil that we are all experiencing…