MARION, Ark. — Sitting in her living room, at a table bearing boxes of public records on raw sewage leaks and utilities in her community, 48-year-old 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,” she said.

“You could play in the parks. You could go fishing,” Meyer said of Lakeshore’s namesake.

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,” he said.

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 '00s, 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, though, Lakeshore’s issues grew far 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 directly 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 from natural causes. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, low dissolved oxygen can result from natural conditions — and it can result from sewage, manure or other pollution being added to the water. Another fish kill occurred in 2018.

And, 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 Commercial Appeal's review of a sample set of 20 bills from six residents' accounts.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in 'club dues' estimated

For as long as Meyer, the lifelong resident, 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.

That means that 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 formal letter to the William L. Johnson Company asking for a report on club dues 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 of the extra money charged to residents, who were recently notified of a new rate hike.

“If they could account for where all this money was going, then why does our neighborhood look like it does?” she said.

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 from Lakeshore residents in the past year, which a spokeswoman provided to The CA. The set includes multiple allegations of water 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, on a fixed income, 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. And 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 of the office’s investigation, adding that any other 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. But Burgos has not been retested since 2003, according to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality's database of facility operators.

While Burgos was on probation in the two years that followed his suspension, 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.

Lakeshore residents say it's been frustrating to see a cycle in which enforcement actions take place but problems perpetuate under the same management.

‘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 various county and state officials, they also believe Lakeshore residents have to compel change themselves.

As part of a small, all-volunteer 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 co-chairs 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, a role similar to a county mayor. 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, meeting amid the family photos and wood paneling that decorate Tucker’s neatly organized 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.

Glenn Greenway, an inspector with the Arkansas Department of Health, which reviews the design of water systems, said he could think of no other communities in which a private, third-party operator stands between residents and their utility providers.

“This is one of those things that, if it was set up now, it’d probably be done different,” he said.

The group is unwilling to accept the system they’ve inherited, Tucker says, because the exploitation of vulnerable people is embedded within it.

“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. They have to just bite it off and chew it. They don’t have a choice,” 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.”

‘I expected them to fix the sewage immediately. They just dug this gigantic hole in the backyard.’

In 2016, the gulf between rates charged and quality of services rendered widened to an unacceptable degree for Meyer, giving rise to her activism since.

That year, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality ordered the William L. Johnson Company to take corrective action on violations of the Arkansas Water and Air Pollution Control Act, which saw untreated sewage flow from residents’ yards into the lake for the second time in seven years.

Among the lots affected: the trailer where Meyer’s son Chris, a hydraulic mechanic, had recently moved in with his girlfriend and then-1-year-old son.

“It was visible in the backyard, with the toilet paper floating around in the yard and the feces,” Chris Meyer said. “Every time you open the door you gotta smell it. Mosquitoes were terrible.”

Meyer and his girlfriend complained to their landlord repeatedly, he said. But after about six months, they gave up and moved out. As a result, they were fined for breaking their lease, he said.

“I expected them to fix the sewage immediately,” he said. “They just dug this gigantic hole in the backyard.”

Tests performed by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality at the time showed the presence of fecal coliform and E. coli.

“It ended up costing us a little over $2,000 to get out of that,” Chris Meyer said. “All we were trying to do was have a more clean, safer environment for our son.”

But since both of the child’s grandmothers live at Lakeshore, Meyer’s son is still at the complex nearly every day after preschool. And now that his son is growing beyond his toddler years, Meyer worries about the confines of his childhood.

Asked what he wants for his son during time spent at Lakeshore with his grandmothers and cousins, Meyer said, “Just a normal, clean neighborhood. Somewhere with more upkept parks, somewhere they could take him outside to go play, instead of having to keep him inside all day, because they’re worried about what they’re going to get into, what’s in the mud puddle they’re playing with,” he said.

“I’d like for him to have somewhere to go play that’s safe,” he said.

‘We’re in this sinking Titanic together’

Although the health of her son and grandson compelled Cassandra Meyer to begin organizing with her neighbors, a broader vision for uniting the community keeps her motivated.

Moving forward, she hopes to make the community improvement group more reflective of the Marion population, which is 60 percent white and 32.5 percent black, according to American Community Survey statistics.

“It’s not as diverse as we wish it would be,” she said, because the existing bylaws on council leadership require a person to be a landowner of property purchased directly from the William L. Johnson Company. “One of the things this council wants to do is change that. We want to include the renters,” she said.

“We’re in this sinking Titanic together,” said Meyer, who added that she thinks the group can help resolve other issues in the neighborhood, such as tensions she says arise over parties and related traffic and noise complaints.

She thinks that if funds were pooled and put into the community, residents could create a pavilion for gatherings and devise a system for notifying neighbors of upcoming events so community members can work out their grievances, “without having to call the police.”

But if the community improvement group began collecting fees, wouldn't that give residents deja vu from their experiences with the William L. Johnson Company?

“The difference is it’s not one man and a mystery man," said Meyer.

"If you go knock on their door, they’re not gonna answer or answer the phone," she said. "We do. They know my address. This is going to be a community group made up by the people who live here.”

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Sarah Macaraeg is an award-winning investigative reporter with The Commercial Appeal, where she writes features and covers the occasional Saturday shift. Macaraeg can be reached at sarah.macaraeg@commercialappeal.com or 901-426-4357. She is on Twitter @seramak.