For months we have read mistruths about Aqua’s interest in purchasing Chester Water Authority. False claims that Aqua would close the Octoraro Reservoir, claims we wouldn’t extend similar jobs to current CWA employees or that they would be forced to relocate and many other complete fabrications that we’ve proven to be inaccurate. Instead of making up mistruths about what Aqua would do to CWA if the sale went through, many of us wish they would answer questions we’ve been asking — like, for instance, whatever happened to the CWA-24?
We’re approaching the two-year anniversary of an April 2020 Daily Times article that the Chester Water Authority stated it was “… not in financial distress, though it did furlough 24 administrative employees.” The furloughs, which accounted for about 15 percent of CWA’s workforce, were attributed to employees who could not work remotely and a 10 percent drop in water usage. These employees and their families lost a paycheck, perhaps their family’s only source of income from which they provided food, shelter, childcare, and education during a global pandemic when a job was perhaps needed most.
Around the time this happened, one CWA employee reached out to me to say that they had not had to look for work in decades and were unsure where to turn. In fact, we hired some of the “furloughed” employees at Aqua Pennsylvania, after CWA reportedly told them they would not return or perhaps they simply wanted a better place to work.
I can’t help but...
A person in his 30s who demanded compensation for alleged foreign substances in cup noodles and the absence of meat in stir-fried pork was sentenced to prison in both the first trial and the appel...