INDIANAPOLIS — A federal judge has scheduled a settlement conference in a legal dispute between the owner of a mobile home park and the city of Seymour involving allegations that the company had underreported its water usage by nearly 63 million gallons over roughly a two-year period.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Crystal S. Wildeman recently scheduled a settlement conference on Feb. 19 to explore the possibility of reaching a settlement to resolve the lawsuit, according to filings in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis.
The lawsuit, filed June 27 by Parkland Inc., alleges that the city of Seymour, among other things, violated what the company has characterized as a decades-long agreement over how its sewer rate would be calculated, resulting in the company being charged more than $250,000 to recover alleged underpayments and later two liens being placed on the property.
The company also has accused one of its former employees, as well as Seymour Clerk-Treasurer Darrin Boas, the Seymour Board of Works and Public Safety and the Seymour Municipal Sanitation Utility, of slander of title.
Parkland Inc. owns and operates the Village Green Homes mobile home park on the south side of Seymour. For roughly the past 40 years, the company has been using a private well it owns to supply the mobile home park with water and has been self-reporting readings from a meter at the wellhead to identify the amount of sewage entering Seymour’s sewer system, according to court records.
In the complaint, Parkland Inc. alleges that former company employee Todd Storey, who the company says was in charge of reading the meter and reporting the readings to the city, resigned in November 2022 and vowed to “take (Gregg) Pardieck down for $250,000.” Pardieck is identified in court filings as the company’s president.
After Storey resigned, he allegedly turned over “confidential business records and trade secrets” — including meter readings — to city officials and “presented a false and malicious story” regarding the payment of sewer fees, according to the complaint.
In October 2023, Pardieck received a letter from Boas, alleging that the company had been underpaying the Seymour Municipal Sanitation Utility in sewer fees for about two years and owed the utility $258,795, the complaint states. Boas initially gave the company one month to pay the entire balance.
According to a copy of the letter included with the complaint, Boas alleges that there had been a “growing disparity” between the amount of water usage that the company had reported to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and the amount reported to the Seymour Municipal Sanitation Utility.
In addition, Boas states in the letter that “it was noticed that there been a substantial decrease in the amount of metered water delivered to Village Green” even though the mobile home park’s “residential population has increased.”
On Nov. 3, the company’s attorney sent a letter to Boas seeking documentation showing how the city calculated the underpayments and requested an extension to pay the balance.
In a letter dated Nov. 6, Boas responded to the request with handwritten records allegedly showing, among other things, how many gallons of water the company reported to IDEM versus what was reported to Seymour’s water utility. Boas also said the city was willing to extend the deadline and accept six monthly payments of $43,126.
The records attached to the complaint reveal varying discrepancies between the amount of water usage Parkland Inc. reported to IDEM and what it reported to Seymour’s water utility from June 2021 to August 2023.
For instance, the records show that the company told IDEM that it had used roughly 5.38 million gallons of water in August 2023 but told Seymour’s water utility that it had only used 1.91 million gallons that month.
Collectively from June 2021 to August 2023, Parkland Inc. reported using around 62.83 million gallons more water to IDEM than what it reported to Seymour’s water utility, according to records included in the complaint.
In late November, Boas sent another letter to Parkland Inc.’s attorney, stating that the city would extend the payment period to 12 months with 12 equal payments of $21,548.
“I’m not certain how long your firm has represented Mr. Pardieck and his holdings, but I am sure you’re aware Mr. Pardieck is a dynamic individual, and the city’s interaction with him has been challenging, if not contentious,” Boas states in the later, dated Nov. 20. “…The city feels your client possesses ample assets to pay the monthly bill associated with Village Green, as he has been paying thousands of dollars less in sewer bills than he was a year to 18 months ago even with the increase in tenants.”
“Failure to make the payment by this due date will result in normal late penalties applied to the account, and three months of nonpayment will result in a lien on the property,” Boas added later in the letter.
Parkland Inc. started making payments in January but subsequently stopped, according to court records. After three months of nonpayment, two liens were placed on the company’s property for a combined amount of $404,367.
The company alleges that it was forced to incur a line of credit at 9% interest to pay the liens. In May, the company paid the liens in full “to avoid the imposition of further alleged penalties and interest,” according to court records.
Parkland Inc., for its part, has alleged that the city illegally “adjusted and changed the methodology and manner of calculating” its sewer rate and did not hold a public hearing on the matter or adopt an ordinance to establish the new rates.
The company alleges that it had a decades-long agreement with the city in which company officials would “report the amount of sanitary sewage (they) believed was entering the sanitary sewer system.”
Under the alleged agreement, the city would then “issue (the company) a monthly bill based on the amount reported which, upon information and belief, was adjusted for the costs incurred by (the company) in operating and maintaining” its own private well and sewer facilities.
The city of Seymour, for its part, has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit and argued in court filings that the company’s assertion that it was assessed a new rate is “a deliberate mischaracterization of what was, in fact, a straightforward mathematical adjustment.”
“The rate applied to calculate the sewer fees has remained unchanged throughout the relevant period,” the city states in court filings. “The city defendants based their charges solely on plaintiff’s water usage, as reported to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. …The city’s recalculations merely adjusted the volume of water reported, not the rate at which the fees were calculated. This adjustment was necessary to rectify prior inaccuracies in water usage reporting, not to introduce a new or higher rate.”
Storey, the former Parkland Inc. employee named as a defendant, also has filed a separate motion to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing, among other things, that he “has or had no affiliation with the city of Seymour, Seymour Boards of Work and Public Safety or Seymour Municipal Sanitation Entities.”
“Accordingly, defendant Storey could not and cannot be considered a public official relative to plaintiff’s Complaint,” according to court filings.
As of Thursday morning, the case and the motions to dismiss were pending in federal court.
