At the August 26, 2026 Board Meeting, Board President Beth Jones justified the new bond by invoking a past infrastructure emergency. She claimed from the dais that under former president Linda Fabre, the board “didn’t want to pay for our lift [station] that was breaking, and it did break and it was a big mess... And that is why it is so important that we never let that happen again.”
But the catastrophic 2023 failure at the Hatch lift station wasn’t a matter of infrastructure neglect. It was a staggering display of operator negligence. According to a followup to the District's legal demand letter, the District's operator, Inframark, noticed a pump leaking and a sump pump failing on February 28, 2023. Instead of fixing the leak or installing a temporary pump, they simply changed the alarm system to email and text to stop the automated phone calls. A week later, on March 7, they found water in the dry well. By March 9, sewage was spilling into the street. Even then, the operator's first response was to say that the problem couldn't be the District's because sewage was spilling from a manhole that was across the street from the District boundary.
The board at the time recognized this negligence. In April 2024, they voted unanimously (with Jones absent) to terminate Inframark and hire a new operator. By the summer, the District sent the demand letter seeking over $140,000 in unreimbursed damages stemming from the spill.
Then the board politics shifted. In June 2024, a new voting bloc formed between outgoing Director Kelley Masters, Beth Jones, and Hanoi Avila. During a single meeting, they moved to restrict director communications with contractors, halt planning the operator transition, and ousted board president Fabre to install Avila, using a baffling justification about "meeting with a constituent." By September 2024, Jones successfully blocked the contract for the replacement operator, publicly declaring that Inframark was doing a good job and was "not at fault" for the Hatch disaster. After the November 2024 election brought in Chris Rocco and Carroll Norrell, the new board majority officially dropped all litigation against Inframark in March 2025. They let a negligent operator off the hook for a six-figure bill and kept them on the payroll.
Now, Jones and Avila are using the specter of that same Hatch failure to justify bond funding. Yet, they are actively delaying refurbishments on the District's other two lift stations until bond money is available. If these stations are truly hanging by a thread, this delay is reckless. The board could have begun work months ago using a standard reimbursement resolution to fund the repairs from savings and then to reimburse the savings account from bond money when it arrives. Instead, they have chosen posturing over prompt infrastructure protection.
Throwing bond money at infrastructure is useless if it is operated ineptly. On June 20, 2025, just a year after its complete refurbishment, the Hatch lift station failed again. Both pumps tripped, and both the wet and dry wells filled to high levels. Once again, the auto-dialer alarms failed to alert anyone. Catastrophic infrastructure damage was avoided only because the recent refurbishment had wisely relocated the control panels out of the dry well, and an overflow was prevented by calling in trucks to pump the levels down. It took until February 2026 for the board to finally send the engineering firm to audit the alarm systems.
Both of the candidates who orchestrated this getaway are running for re-election, with Hanoi Avila campaigning on the slogan, “Accountability matters.” But when it came to holding the District's operator accountable for a massive sewage failure and a near repeat? They looked the other way.