Officials with the city of Magnolia confirmed that the Magnolia Ridge subdivision had free water for several months, but said it was a mistake, and that the company eventually paid the several-thousand-dollar bill.

The housing development, located off of FM 1488 near the intersection of Buddy Riley Boulevard, has several paved roads and cleared lots, but currently no residents. The development is owned and managed by Magnolia-Tex Acquisition Company, LLC.

City Administrator Ryan Kelley said that he never knew about the situation because of the procedure at the time of handling the water disconnect list.

“At some point, before I got here, LuAnn (Drake, former city secretary) told them to send her the cutoff list and she would OK them to be cut off,” Kelley said. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, from the way I’m trained. I don’t have that discretion.”

The city of Magnolia owns its water and sewer systems while TNG Utilities, based in Spring, operates the systems.

According to Kelley, the disconnect list was sent monthly to Drake, and during the time Magnolia Ridge was not paying and was on the disconnect list, she did not tell him.

“They have three meters, and what happened was at some point, they stopped paying. At some point, they got behind,” Kelley said. “Our law is, if you get behind, the company sends you a notice and if you don’t pay after a certain time, they cut you off.”

Kelley said that while Drake was with the city, TNG would notify her and she would approve the customers being disconnected.  He added that the law has no discretion to staff members, with the exception of right before Christmas, which it is the mayor’s policy not to cut anyone off.

“I didn’t know she (Drake) was doing disconnects until a certain point,” Kelley said. “They weren’t cut off because she didn’t tell TNG to cut them off. Once we found this out, I talked to the mayor and he said we’d give them a couple of days and then cut them off.”

Kelley said the water disconnect list procedure has since been changed.

“What happened was, they didn’t pay for awhile, but she didn’t tell us, and we didn’t know,” Kelley said. “It shouldn’t have been allowed to get to that level.”

However, in an e-mail obtained by the Tribune through an open records request, Kelley asks city hall employees to “bring me a current report on Magnolia Ridge unpaid bills.” The date on the e-mail is June 1, more than six weeks before Magnolia Ridge finally paid its bill.

Drake would not address specific issues, but did release a statement Sept. 3 to the Tribune regarding the incident.

 “City of Magnolia Ordinance 2007-110 Article IV Section 3, Termination for Delinquency does not provide any instructions or guidance in reference to exemptions from service disconnection. The TNG reports were e-mailed to myself and City Administrator Ryan Kelley due to my prior experience in the utility department. I reviewed the list to assist in locating abnormal or unusual accounts scheduled for disconnection, not to determine if customers were to be exempt from disconnection. Any removal of Magnolia Ridge from the service termination list would have occurred per instruction from the City Administrator or Mayor Thornton.”

The bill, which Kelley said totaled “a few thousand dollars,” was paid in full July 17. Kelley added that the August water bill for Magnolia Ridge has been paid in full as well.

“Debbie (Brent, current City Secretary) and I both sent the disconnect notice. We both know it’s up to the ordinance, not up to us,” Kelley said.

Aaron Polatek, an associate with Magnolia-Tex Acquisition Company, LLC, who did not join the company until mid-July, said that the overdue bills were an accident.

“It must’ve gotten lost in transition,” Polatek said. “New people were getting involved, and I just moved to Houston July 14 from New York.”

Now no longer in a transition period, Polatek said that the development is now moving forward at “full speed.”

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