Richard P. Hobbs
213 Edgar Avenue
Steubenville, Ohio 43952
No phone can’t afford one
E-mail: ReadthebibleAmerica@usa.com June 2, 2004
New Business ( I am very poor. I must be very frugal. I must use small type so I can have fewer pages to copy. It’s a dime a page. )
Legal firm( You can easily and inexpensively enlarge this on any copier You can also find it on my web site http://www.richardhobbs.4t.com )
Dear Attorney who decides on new Business for this firm: Or Dear Committee that oversees new business for this firm: This is a request for pro bono help. It is a case where with success your firm will be paid by the defendants. That is in the statute. It will also be a large bargaining chip to try and get a pretrial settlement. We are trying to improve the law and life for all of us.
There is a serious problem in the United States today that effects each citizen. Persons working for or on the behalf of the government can violate the rights of those they have power over. They can abuse the rights of individual members of the public and the public in general. They can do this with great impunity. This is a very bad thing for our nation. That this exists is bad public policy. However there is no one addressing this issue. It is worse than tyranny. Because I tyrant you can bring down. However, what can you do when repeatedly, across the land, persons with power are corrupted or inept and use that power to ride over the rights of individuals? When ever we go to court on a civil rights violation the person working for the government is given an artificial cloak of protection. Even if they were made to ‘pay’ for their abuse of power there is probably and insurance policy.. They have no fear of doing wrong because they know they are immune from redress or any harm. The result is persons with power who are able to violate the social contract. The contract that says ‘yes the ‘officer of the law’ might abuse his power to violate your rights and mistreat you but you can then sue him.’ This fear of being sued and having to pay out of his pocket for damages, punitive and otherwise would mitigate the abuse of power by those wielding power. However, we have stripped our system of any strength to do this. This is a great concern. It cannot remain this way. It is fodder for too much civil abuse. This is bad for our society. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Here we have created a class of individuals with absolute power and immunity from the misuse of that power.
But the courts repeatedly will claim that the persons who were the administrative law judge and abused their power could not possibly have know under the circumstances that they were violating the individuals rights. This is their cloak. Even when laws deem them responsible, the court and our legal system lets them get around those laws. That is a cop out. One of the responsibilities they had, one of the requirements of their job, was to understand the individuals rights and to protect the individuals rights. Except in the most severe cases they are allowed to do what they want. This creates an atmosphere where there is no accountability. It fosters the highly publicized violent acts that occur. We do not want that. We want Social Justice for each citizen. We do not want to redress in the courts. We want protection from needing to redress this issue. We want those who have power over us to know they will be accountable when they misuse or abuse that authority and thus be restrained. Those who wield power in government are primarily responsible to carry out the law without violating individual human rights, public rights. If our society and our nation is to survive those wielding power have a fundamental responsibility to know and to adhere to this truth.
That fundamental issue brings this suit. The other issue is the one of the human right to have water. In most cases, our municipal water supplies are antiquated. They for the most part operate on the eighteenth century ideas that
1. There should be a preferred upper class of individuals and they should benefit at the lower classes expense.
2. The idea that the lower classes are inferior and are to be controlled by the upper class, also,
3. The idea that one person or group of persons should be the ruling class.
4. Each person would be held responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of their home and the plumbing fixtures therein and
5. No matter the cause if someone’s plumbing did not work as it was supposed to then that person will be held absolutely completely liable for any and all water that runs through that system.
The same thinking that once made anyone with a catastrophic illness lose all their savings and their home to pay for it. We have moved away from that because more and more of us have experienced the calamity. We have realized it was more a collective need than an individual responsibility. The punishment we force on anyone who has had a catastrophe that caused water to run through their meter is that either they pay for it all or they have their water turned off.
This leads to the question of water. Is it a basic human need? Is it a right or a privilege? Is it just to turn someone’s water off under any circumstances when they are a part of a collective? Is it and should it continue to be the absolute responsibility of the individual? Should it be so in this day and age when with the proper use of technology we could as a community prevent waste of water, prevent each member of the collective from ever having a bill so high that it is unreasonable and unlikely to ever be paid, and improve life for us all? This could inexpensively be done if sensors were placed in each customer’s service and monitored by computers whenever there was an abnormal use of water the water collective would know it within hours the water user could be notified or the water turned off to prevent waste instead of as a punitive measure. Call it what you would to turn someone’s water supply off for any reason is a punitive measure.
We as a nation spend millions of dollars going to foreign third world countries to dig wells to provide clean drinking water and to prevent the spread of disease caused by poor sewage management. In fact, the other reason we developed municipal water systems (Besides the fact that it often gave the super wealthy another way to take money from the masses.) was to prevent disease. If many person were going to live in close proximity it was wise to have clean healthy water supplied to each residence and a safe convenient way to carry away waste. Then we used the threat of losing one’s water as a way to pressure the individual homeowners to keep their plumbing up. However, the individual homeowner is not an expert in water or plumbing. Repeatedly a toilet tank would run and they would not know it or realize it and they would end up with a huge bill for water they neither wanted nor used, nor benefited from. The self-righteous nation that we are we felt if fair and justified to charge them even though we each realized the law was not right and it was not just and it should be different. But it never was.
We all know those laws were used by the wealthy to protect the wealthy at the expense of the poor and the massive middle classes. We all know that sometimes a Law or legal idea is allowed to be maintained even when it is unreasonable because we humans have the habit of using the law to defraud others. In addition, as long as they can pretend to themselves that this evil is not what is really happening we seem to allow it to continue. The result is it harms all of us. To continue following this eighteenth century model of providing water within cities, determining the costs of it and distributing the water and distributing the costs of providing it across the members of the collective is to harm us all.
It is unfair. It creates three classes. 1.The one minority class, which tries to preserve water (A modern practice, which in a twenty first century model is usually rewarded given our understanding of the value of conserving resources) is penalized by being charged a minimum usage fee. This persons per gallon cost is much higher than anyone else’s. They are subsidizing the majority class. 2. The majority class of individuals who are having their water subsidized to a degree by the other two classes. 3.The third class, a second of the two minority classes who have had (a.) some catastrophe or for (b.) some reason, whatever the reason, have had more water go through their meter than they ever wanted or intended. They end up with a bill they cannot pay. In this third class, one of two things happen, if the bill is not too high or the persons it happened to is rich or even middle class they pay it and they continue to get water. But they are not paying for water they used. They are paying for water that the entire system is responsible for the loss of because those in authority and who knew better have failed to install safeguards to protect the users form such occurrences. They are also subsidizing the others who are in the majority and who have never had a catastrophe. If they are poor and can not pay this high and unreasonable bill they get their water cut off. In either case, when they do not pay the bill a lien is placed on their house. Their heirs or children are deprived of part of what is usually the largest single investment the lower middle class person has. One the cost of providing that extra water is not more than providing water to each customer. The cost if any to extra chemicals is far below what they are charging the user. They are profiteering form that persons misfortune and sharing the profit evenly amongst the majority users. Those with an average water bill. This is wrong and unfair. Then too in many cases the money is not collected. The household goes without the water for how long? If the lien is ever satisfied, it does not cover the chemicals they have been paid for by the collective. This proves the cost is not so high as they attempt to charge for it.
As a society we are up in arms when a place like Enron or unfair investment schemes of major investment firms defraud many upper class individuals of their life savings but we sit idly by as social injustice supported by antiquated unreasonable ideas governing our water supplies harms many individuals in the lower classes. What should happen is a water supply should be equally responsible for over use of water because it is within their expertise, and their knowledge of these things and it is within their power and financial means to modernize the system to operate in a way better for all of us. This is allowed to carry on because the majority class of the water users are having their bills subsidized by those who use little or no water and those who have had a catastrophe the two minority classes. The majority would never use the ballot to change a system, which benefits them. The minority could never convince them. Still the idea that anyone in a city should be without water is inhumane, is a violation of health and safety standards and is an antiquated idea whose time to end has come. However, it is against the best interests of the majority. Yet, the cities that operate under these systems are in decline. It is their failure to modernize that is their deathblow. However, as most persons who are using oppressive and immoral ideas to support their dynasties of abuse they will never see the harm it is doing. They will never understand it or do anything to fix it until someone else makes them.
The fact is it becomes a civil right’s issue right from the start because clean wholesome drinking water is a basic human need and the ability to flush a toilet is a basic necessity if persons are going to live in a community. However, because of long standing segregationists’ policies and the oppression of the racial minority classes far more children of minority families end up without water than do white children. More poor Black school Children lack water to take a bath or to flush their toilets than do majority racial classes. Far more poor minority families lose the ability to pass their life’s savings onto their children than do white families. This just fosters an uneven and unfair continuation of poverty in the minority classes in greater proportions than those in the non-minority races. The percentage of minority families that end up in this situation is higher than the percentage of non-minority classes. This fosters the past inequalities and continues to have negative effects on our society. We have realized and decided that we are going to level the playing fields. While some talk about reparation, we continue to punish persons for being poor when we have thrust that poverty upon them because of their race. We continue through the color of abusive unfair local laws, which are antiquated and unjust mete out social injustice. We mistreat minorities and reward the majority in a racially unfair manner. Then we proudly and foolishly slap ourselves on our backs for our wisdom and justice progression as a nation in racial equality.
Let us take a census of the nation and see how many more black families and other minority families end up with their water turned off than do families of the Caucasian race. We do not try to drive around in model T fords. When old modes of transportation wear out we get modern ones. The old model for water distribution and how to pay for survives because it is basically unfair and the majority benefits from the unfairness. The minorities suffer oppression. There is no motivation to change it.
I have initiated a lawsuit in the Federal court because I had a triple catastrophe. I went away from my new home for a weekend. I went to NY to get the last of my belongings with a moving van I had purchased with which to make my move from NY to Ohio. It was a used short school bus converted to a moving van. While in NY a fire occurred in my vehicle. The fire company came and put out the fire. As they did they smashed all the windows. The firemen broke every window and the vehicle was impounded with my belongings in it. It cost me a fortune to get it back. I ended up stranded and stuck in NYC homeless for three months while trying to get the vehicle back. I had left for a week and was kept away for three months. While I was away although I had left the heat on a toilet tank burst on the second floor. Water cascaded throughout the newly purchased home for who knows how long. I was a victim of a fire. Then a flood. I was told there was an Utilities Delinquency Review Board. I asked for a hearing. I asked for some basic information about the board and the process that I would go through so I could prepare a good defense. My experience with this board and the City led me to realize this board was either completely incompetent or they were intentionally violating the rights of those who came before them. They were very clearly a group of individuals with government power who were misusing that power to abuse those who came before them. Every attempt I made before and during the meeting to have adequate information in order to be able to present a fair and reasonable defense for myself was frustrated by the city. Each attempt I made during that time to get them to follow basic democratic practices in the carrying out of their duties was met with frustration and failure. The hearing never even rose to the level of a hearing because they did not follow any sort of guidelines at all and if they did, they were unclear. Even the most basic etiquette of a most basic business meeting was not followed. I ended up in front of a tribunal which had power over me. They could decide my fate and cause harm to me. They completely disregarded my rights in every substantial way. They violated due process.
What happened in that meeting was a clear violation of due process. Discovery will make it clear. Then this is a valid civil rights action. In addition, because they did in fact violate my rights under the color of law there is just cause for an action. I filed a lawsuit as an indigent person. The catastrophe of the move and being stranded homeless in NYC for three months and the flood in my home have brought me to utter ruin. The home was never supposed to have been placed in my name to begin with. It has correctly had the title and deed turned over to the church and 501(c) 3 non-profit organization that it was supposed to be placed in the name of to begin with. I can not afford to hire a lawyer.
I need a good lawyer. I need one who will understand the importance of the case and who will agree with the idea that the system as it now stands is socially unjust. This civil rights action will give legal means to challenge the racial inequality of the system and force water service in the US to move to a modern model making life easier and better for all of us. It is ridiculous that we spend millions to dig wells in Africa and let our African-American and Any-American neighbors here in the US go without water to flush their toilets in. Because it is a Civil Rights suit and because my rights were in fact violated, as well as those of anyone else who ever sat before that board. The firm that successfully represents me will be able to present the defendants with a bill. That is in the federal statute. That is vital. The firm representing me must intend to collect that if and when the court orders it. On the other hand, I am indigent and the firm representing me must do so with their full force and abilities and do so on a pro-bono basis for me. The firm should do it because they recognize this as a vital public interest. The threat of having to pay for the plaintiff’s attorneys may help the defendants to recognize the error of their ways, cave in, and co-operate and
1. turn on the water of the families they have water turned off to and
2. Figure some other way a more just and equitable way to resolve mishaps that happen in the water supply, and,
3. Establish a modern system where there are sensors which can immediately notify the collective when water is being wasted so that we can take a pro-active approach to water management rather than this antiquated Model T ford approach which does absolutely no one any good.
With all that said, would your firm represent me. If I do not get an attorney, I shall have to do the case on my own. That will be difficult. I do not have the resources to do it. On the other hand, it must be done. I cannot as a citizen stand idly by while freedom is being denied and not defend it. Too many have died defending freedom for me not to apply it, use it, and see to it that my neighbors who are unnecessarily suffering without water get it turned on. My neighbors across the street have three children and their water is off. This cannot stand. In addition, the idea of having a charity pay for these bills is ludicrous. The family did not use ,000 of water. Their high bill is neither their responsibility nor is it within their ability to pay. Their bill is unjust as mine is. However, they as do most poor persons in Steubenville think this is the way it is and you can’t do anything about it.
I also need an attorney to help me with the appeal of their decision that my water should get shut off at the county court level. I have a good defense; a winnable defense. However, I am not aware of any means by which the city can be forced to pay an attorney who represents me in that matter. I need one and immediately because I only have two weeks to appeal it. That attorney needs to be able and willing to represent me pro-bono.
This then is a request for help from your law firm
1. For pro-bono help with an appeal to the Jefferson County Court on the decision of the Steubenville Utilities Delinquency Board to shut off my water because I would not enter in to a repayment agreement with them. And,
2. A Law firm to represent me in a Federal Civil Rights Law suit. Which I have already initiated and for which a hearing was held for a TRO which was denied and a hearing is set for July 8th 2004. To pursue the matter before Judge Algenon L. Marbley Case number 04-cv-432. Southern District of Ohio.
You can see my feeble attempt at a federal complaint by going to the web site www.richardhobbs.4t.com The complaint is there, and other information. Also there may be pertinent information at www.readthebibleamerica.4t.com I have been to Southeaastern Ohio Legal Services . They have said they will not help me. This case needs a good top notch attorney. It is not a case for my interests but for the interests of social justice. It is a case where the rubber meets the road. It is not ethereal or high minded. It is about real life and real injustice. It is time we corrected the Law so it was right and that it made things right instead of continuing to do harm to our fellow citizens and harm to our entire society as it now does.
Therefore, I must ask you. Please, will you represent me?
Sincerely,
Richard P. Hobbs
