From the Desk of Teri Nigretto
President, Eastsound Water Users Association
Good evening EWUA members,
The Water House plan was a big deal for Steve Smith when he was President of EWUA. He worked hard on the proposal in 2021 and pulled Dan Burke temporarily off his role as General Manager of EWUA to help him on the project.
BTW, this document is available to any member who wishes to see it. Just call the office and we will send it.
Water House called for our board to join Mr. Smith in a three-step workplan. First, the EWUA board would be asked to vote to “contribute” an EWUA-owned parcel of land north of Mt. Baker Road near the airport where we have employee housing. In addition, EWUA would “contribute” an option we held on an adjacent parcel of land listed for sale by Rick Christmas. And we would “loan” Water House $25,000 in cash.
Second, the EWUA board members were invited to simultaneously join the Water House board, which would in turn raise approximately $10 million from a loan provided by EWUA, and out of that amount would receive a $600,000 “commission.”
Third, Water House would use the $10 million to build a multi-unit housing cluster on the land and forever charge an annual “management fee” that Smith himself hoped to collect.
It sure looks to me like Water House was the “lucrative” opportunity to which Steve Smith had alluded to in his conversations with Scott Lancaster, Jonnie Welsh, and others in mid-2021.
Much more concerning is the reaction we got from a professor of business ethics at the University of Washington who reviewed the Water House document with its hefty payouts to participants and said, “This is textbook ‘conflict.’”
Rick Christmas has something to say about all of this. After all, it was his land that Steve Smith wanted…
Rick Christmas, Former Board Member
“Steve Smith called me around 7:30 pm one night in October of 2021. He asked if I would be interested in owning part of Eastsound Water if he took it private.
He said, “Rick, water is the new oil. There is a tremendous opportunity here.”
I immediately said “stop, this is a terrible idea. You will get tarred and feathered by the community if you try to do this and you need to stop right now.”
Steve Smith then said that he had other investors involved and that I was making a big mistake for missing this opportunity.”