THE FALL OF LAKESHORE ESTATES
MARION, Ark. — Sitting at a table bearing boxes of public records on raw sewage leaks and utilities in her community, Cassandra Meyer paused to remember what Lakeshore Estates was like growing up.
In what began in the ’60s as a retirement community where she was raised by her grandparents, Meyer recalled spilling off her school bus every day to a grilled cheese cooked by her grandmother, followed by the rambunctious play of a childhood spent outdoors.
“It was just like any other neighborhood, only we lived in trailers. You could play in the parks. You could go fishing,” said Meyer, 43.
Her neighbor, Marvin Tucker, also remembers the community fabric that once surrounded him in Lakeshore, where he swam and hung out with friends every day in the summer, while
his mom worked in a beauty parlor within the approximately 360-lot complex.
“There was a store, there was an arcade, a laundromat,” Tucker said. “It was just a clean, fun place.”
After they entered adulthood, Tucker moved away from Arkansas to work in construction in Mississippi, but Meyer stayed in Lakeshore. The affordable cost of growing up there had translated to vacations across the country with her grandfather and happy memories from religiously attending Arkansas Razorbacks football games together.
Meyer, a former warehouse worker, wanted to be able to afford similar experiences for her children. But, by the time they were growing up in the ’90s and 2000s, everything that once gave Lakeshore its quality of life was gone.
Despite monthly fees paid per lot owner to fund the upkeep of the lake and six parks, the green spaces were overgrown, the playground equipment was decrepit and everyone knew not to eat the fish, her son Chris recalled of his childhood. In the years that followed, Lakeshore’s issues grew worse.
When Tucker returned to the community in 2009, to care for his aging father and uncle, and a brother with a disability, he said he was shocked.
That year saw the first of two major Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality inspections at Lakeshore within seven years. The inspections found violations of the state’s Water and Air Pollution Control Act — in the form of raw sewage flowing into the lake.
The agency also studied a 2014 incident in which more than 10,000 fish in the lake died en masse. Inspectors described the fish kill as the “likely” result of a low level of dissolved oxygen in the water. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, low dissolved oxygen can result from natural conditions — and it can result from sewage, or other pollution being added to the water. Another fish kill occurred in 2018.
In May of that year, the Arkansas Department of Health also intervened in the operation of a water pumping station that an inspector said is still not up to code. Yet throughout the decades of Lakeshore’s decay, its developer, the William L. Johnson Company, collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for the subdivision’s maintenance, The Commercial Appeal estimates.
The issues also occurred despite the fact Lakeshore residents pay the William L. Johnson Company sewer and water fees that are approximately three times higher than that of people inside West Memphis and Marion city limits, hundreds of feet away — based on The CA’S review of 20 bills from six residents’ accounts.
Hundreds of thousands in ‘club dues’ estimated
For as long as Meyer can remember, lot owners have been charged a monthly $5 “club dues” fee — paid per lot, for the approximately 360-lot subdivision’s maintenance. The oldest documentation of the $5 fee The CA could find dates back to 1993, though Lakeshore’s founding bylaws from 1966 also mention a fee of unspecified amount.
By a conservative estimate, $270,000 in maintenance funds would have been collected from residents over the decades, if only half of the 360 lots paid the monthly fee, in the 25 years between 1993 and 2018.
In December 2017, the club dues fees disappeared from bills after residents sent a letter to the William L. Johnson Company asking for a report on expenditures. But a strange thing happened at the same time: Meyer and other residents noticed that their sewer bills rose by $5.
“It’s frustrating because we know it didn’t go into our neighborhood,” Meyer said.
“If they could account for where all this money was going, then why does our neighborhood look like it does?” she said.
BRAD VEST / THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
The William L. Johnson Company
Seeking oversight, Meyer filed a consumer protection complaint with Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge last June. And she’s not the only one.
The office has received 17 complaints on Lakeshore in the past year, which a spokeswoman provided to The CA. The set includes multiple allegations of consumption charges that challenge logic. One couple sent the Attorney General their bill for 31,149 gallons of water they supposedly used within a month. (The CA separately obtained another bill which charged for 199,705 gallons in a single month.) Another resident said she was charged $67 per month for each of five months her trailer was unoccupied.
Tucker’s 78-year-old father wrote that his water bill was so high, he couldn’t afford to water his lawn and that the cost was cutting into his food budget. Seven people complained about the defunct parks. One resident said a sewage main was bubbling up into his backyard.
“Attorney General Rutledge is working diligently toward a solution to ensure residents are treated appropriately and fairly,” a spokeswoman said, adding that any Arkansans with concerns were welcome to contact the office directly.
The William L. Johnson Company’s president, Abbott Widdicombe, who lives in Memphis, said in a written statement to The CA that the club dues were used for park maintenance and that they covered the cost of streetlights. He also said Lakeshore’s rates are in line with other rural systems and that repairs are underway.
“Our streetlights don’t work,” Meyer said, adding, “I don’t mind paying these extravagant prices, but we’re not getting our side of the bargain.”
Vice President Joel Burgos — who bills and collects residents’ water, garbage and sewage fees as “Lakeshore Water” — did not respond to The CA’S questions.
Burgos has previously had his license as a waste water operator suspended in 2007 after he “failed to exercise reasonable care, judgment or application of knowledge,” as the plant operator for nearby Edmondson, Arkansas, which was brought under state oversight as a result, according to agreements signed between the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, the Edmondson mayor and Burgos’ lawyer. Burgos was required to retake waste water courses and an ethics class to avoid having his license revoked, one agreement showed.
While Burgos was on probation in the two years that followed, inspections took place in Lakeshore for sewage leaks for which the William L. Johnson Company was eventually fined $3,600 and brought into a consent agreement with the state in 2010.
On the banks of the Mississippi river, the company also owns an RV park and previously owned a landfill that was designated a Superfund priority site until 2004, according to tax records and Environmental Protection Agency documents. A federal consent decree signed in 2000 mandated the William L. Johnson Company and other parties to carry out remediation efforts at the landfill, after the company leased out land that was used for dumping oil waste, producing lead and other contamination.
‘It feels like we’re the people in movies with the pitch forks, storming the castle’
Meyer and Tucker are hopeful the Attorney General’s review might improve their situation. But after years of complaints to officials, they also believe Lakeshore residents have to compel change themselves.
As part of a small, allvolunteer group of fellow trailer owners, Meyer and Tucker have launched a movement. Their goals: to restore the quality of life in the community and depose the developer they say has presided over the neighborhood’s disrepair.
The upstart group, dubbed the Lakeshore Community Improvement Group, re-invigorated a long-defunct process, written into the subdivision’s bylaws, for electing a council of residents. After winning a two-year term in a December 2018 election, the leadership slate in which Meyer and Tucker are cochairs has effectively begun taking on the role of a mini-government for their subdivision.
“I commend them for what they’re doing,” said Woody Wheeless, Crittendon County’s Quorum Court Judge. Wheeless also remembers Lakeshore’s better days and said the conditions residents now endure are unacceptable.
“Nobody in today’s society should have to worry about raw sewage on the ground,” he said. “Those days should be long gone.”
In the meantime, the community improvement group has committed to convening every week, amid the family photos and wood paneling that decorate Tucker’s trailer, where his girlfriend’s grandson will soon be moving in. At a recent meeting, the group planned to implement a code-enforcement process to address blight, following a neighborhood clean-up of the parks, empty lots and ditches being used as dump sites.
They also talked about the next steps to take with a lawyer they’ve recently placed on retainer, to pursue legal action aimed at wresting control of the community infrastructure from the William L. Johnson Company.
“Sometimes it feels like we’re the people in movies with the pitch forks, storming the castle,” Meyer said.
Cutting out the middle man
But while the group may be taking bold measures, they say the change they seek comes down to common sense.
Lakeshore currently gets its water from the city of West Memphis and has its sewage treated by the city of Marion. According to Tucker, the group just wants to eliminate the middleman. And they want to take the reins of management to ensure the sewer system is properly upgraded, which they hope to fund through government grants that they’ve researched alongside a consultant who’s worked with other trailer communities.
“I’d like to see him stop stepping on the little people that’s low-income and the retired people that’s living on social security,” Tucker said of Burgos’ management of Lakeshore Water.
“They’re not able to move, so they have to tolerate whatever he says the price is going to be,” he said.
He and Meyer say they can both remember previous efforts by residents to rein in their bills. But where those efforts have fallen short, Tucker says, the new organization will fight to the finish.
“There’s been attempts,” he said. “But this time, it’s not an attempt. We’re riding this pony to the ground and we gon’ grab another one to keep going. We’re not giving in.”