Graham Baskerville, Donald Cain and Delmer Fjarli have been elected to the Board of Directors of the Howell Mountain Mutual Water Company.

All three bring solid experience and financial know-how to the Board. Their election reflects the desire of the membership to replace members of the old Board with newcomers. Only two directors - Doug Bock and Marie Carlton - are left-overs from the old Board which promoted the purchase of the Hospital water system, drove the company to the brink of bankruptcy, and acted illegally in a number of ways. This looks like a new beginning.

If you are a member of the Howell Mountain Mutual Water Co., we suggest you go to the reports which immediately follow the story below.

We have been watching the Olympic games. We have seen young men and women from 26 countries win medals on snowy slopes and ice rinks in the Italian Alps.

In thousands of big cities - and little villages like Angwin - around the world, we watched them command their bodies to acts of superb beauty, speed, and stamina.

We love these exhibitions of excellence.

A young woman spills in the last split second of an otherwise splendid figure-skating performance. Our favorite cross country skier fades in the last half-mile of an 18-mile race. We groan outwardly, and cry a little inwardly, at the heartbreaking twists of circumstance which rob these young people of their dreams.

But the exuberance, the screaming exultation for the winners of Olympic contests is an unmatched experience. It is best for one of our own, but it is almost as joyful to see greatness wearing the face of someone from Latvia, Japan, Sweden. We rise from our chairs to cheer.

We love to see people excel.

Next we will watch the Oscars. In the glitz and glamor of Hollywood, men and women will stride across a stage to be recognized as the best in their profession. We have seen what they can do in the movies. How well they depict the human race in its dramatic episodes. How well they write the stories, sing the songs, create the scenery and costumes, how well they take on other characters and make them real. How deftly they tell the stories that carry us to sadness, anger, or laughter.

People of excellence.

In our private lives, where most of us are mediocre and only on rare occasions win the applause of our peers, we love to see people doing things really, really well. So we watch the Olympics for hours, and we will be glued to the TV for the Oscars. Because they tell us - once again - that human beings are capable of greatness.

A Blue Ribbon Committee of the Howell Mountain Mutual Water Company has completed a report of the financial condition of the company and proposed two options for raising revenue.

THE ANGWIN REPORTER is presenting the Committee's three reports in full, slightly edited: Why so much attention to this subject? Because 385 families in Angwin and Deer Park depend upon the company for their water. That is 35% of our population.

The fact of the matter is that the water company, which we own, has run out of money. The purpose of this Report by the independent Blue Ribbon Committee is to tell the membership just how serious our problem is.

1. There is a stack of bills on the office manager's desk which we cannot pay.

2. The line of credit for $100,000 at the bank has been exhausted.

3. We have a reserve in the bank to pay our debt to the State for money borrowed many years ago for purchase and upgrades to our water system. Last month, the Board had to dip into that fund to pay current bills.

4. Our operations manager has given us a $40,000 list of immediate operating needs. This includes repairs to the filter plant that must be made now to produce the water quality the State requires.

5. Three years ago, a landslide from a vineyard carried soil into two of our lakes and polluted the water supply. We must budget substantial sums to legally recover the costs to our system.

6. The State of California long ago gave our company certain rights to collect and impound water. We are endeavoring to revise those water rights and address the seismic condition of the dams. We need $40,000 to pay legal and engineering costs to satisfy the State this year.

7. Meanwhile, our system continues to deteriorate. The White Cottage line is being held together with band-aids on top of band-aids. It may cost $1.6 million to reconstruct that line alone.

8. Past Boards created no reserve for replacement of lines as they wear out. Some of the deferred repairs can be put off no longer. They total more than $5 million.

Given our serious financial situation, there is no question but that immediate action is necessary. Some of those actions are presented in Report #3 which follows. But - on the positive side - we need to understand why these problems are not insurmountable. This community has the intelligence, commitment, leadership and will to maintain this asset under local control.

The prospects are good for solidifying our water rights. We believe the State Dept. of Water Resources will once and for all give us final legal certainty for exclusive use of all of the runoff from the basin, in perpetuity.

A do-able plan has been developed for the Water Company to increase the capacity of Lake Henne sufficiently to provide for safe storage of all of our water under current dam safety standards. County Measure A funds will be available to implement this project.

While the distribution system suffers from significant deferred maintenance, our Company has been actively applying for State Water Bond grants for improvement to the distribution system under California Proposition 50. Federal Community Development Block Grants are also achievable and the first $35,000 in these funds was allocated this year. With future Statewide infrastructure bonds almost a certainty in the next 1-2 years, grants will continue to be available for small California water systems.

The Company's long-term State loans still enjoy low interest and will be paid off by 2018, thus freeing up working capital.

The quality of our water exceeds all State Standards and the treatment facilities, while suffering from deferred maintenance, are modern and efficient having been upgraded and installed with State loans of $2.5 million in 1991.

The continued threat to our water quality from adjacent hillside vineyard erosion and potential winery development is a serious one. The Company is now negotiating with one private party whose vineyard development has produced increased turbidity, iron and manganese in our system. While our legal action can be costly, we are confident that these costs will be recovered.

Editorial note: Contents of the Committee Report #3 have been rewritten below for brevity.

Members have been paying for their water in two ways. They pay a $38 a month flat fee. That also gives them 415 cu. ft. of water free. Then, they pay for any additional water they use at the rate of 9.17 cents per cubic foot of water.

To solve our financial problems, it will be necessary to raise $150,000 more revenue each year. That is about 30% more than the existing rate schedule is producing.

The Blue Ribbon Committee believes that the $50 a month increase in the flat fee proposed by the Board is too high. Its calculations indicate that the flat fee of $38 a month plus additional water usage by members will suffice.

The Committee is proposing two options.

OPTION A. Members choosing Option A will pay the existing $38 per month flat fee. but they will get no free water for that, as heretofore. They will pay 9.17 cents for every cubic foot of water used. They can reduce their water usage or increase it as they wish, month by month.

OPTION B. Members choosing Option B will pay the same flat fee as Option A and the same price of 9.17 cents for any water they use.

However, the Option B user will be given the opportunity to buy additional water at a greater reduced rate. If he agrees to use the same amount of water he has used monthly, on average over the past three years, he will be given a bonus for buying MORE water. That bonus will be a generous $1,000 worth of free water. (That amounts to $82 worth of free water each month.)

Option B is a plain and simple marketing proposal - "if you buy more of our product, we will give it to you at a dramatically reduced rate."

Each member will be given a choice of the two Options. Each member will receive from the company a report of what he would experience under both plans.