Rebuffed by Los Osos and the courts of San Luis Obispo County, urban wastewater cowboy Tom Murphy, proprietor of “The Reclamator” onsite system, is back pawing familiar ground and has turned himself into a perpetual suit-filing machine. His target for the new year: Everybody.
Holed up in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, Murphy has been firing off rounds of lawyerless suits in federal courts against the federal government, the EPA, the State of California, and Lake Havasu City. Filing suits is nothing new for Murphy – it’s always been his calling card — but he may have already played all his cards and used up his suit quota for 2010 just in January and February alone.
On January 29 Murphy had “Consent Judgments” delivered to members of the Lake Havasu City Council, giving them a midnight deadline to accept, sign, notarize, and drop in the mailbox at 1802 Combat Drive in Lake Havasu City. It seems Murphy claims not only to have caught the city red-handed breaking federal water law, but city council members personally violating federal law by polluting as well.
“I am filing against 5 LHC city council members as citizens discharging toxic pollutants from their home, i.e. source,” wrote Murphy “To All” in a January 22 email. “They will have 20 days to decide to agree to a Consent Judgment (I am drawing up now for their acceptance), or, they are in for one big challenge to convince a federal judge they have a right to pollute…oh, not to mention at an estimated cost to retain an attorney to represent them in a federal court will be about $150,000 each.”
Murphy’s filing and court costs? Next to nothing.
On February 4 he launched payback suits against a variety of high-level government officials, including Lake Havasu City council members, Governor Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Brown of California, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, USEPA District Administrator Alexis Strauss, the San Luis Obispo judge who heard his case there and dismissed it with prejudice (he still owes $5,000 in court costs), and others who have either previously ruled against him or generally ignored him.
Now the city of Lake Havasu has had just about enough of Dee Thomas Murphy and officials are looking for legal ways to make his stay in Lake Havasu a brief one. That’s won’t be so easy. It seems it’s tough to hold someone accountable in Lake Havasu City if they have no fixed address, own nothing in their own name, and haven’t been charged with any crime they can make stick — yet. At this point, there is nothing the city would rather do than hasten his departure or jail him for abusing the law — as soon as they can figure out exactly which law he is abusing.
Meanwhile, Murphy’s charges are the same as those tossed out by every other court: Failure to obey federal water pollution law which triggers “Murphy’s Law.” Following federal law, he preaches, would pave the way for his exclusive, must-buy, no-questions-asked, souped-up-septic bullet, “The Reclamator.” To freshen his stale brief, Murphy lodged federal R.I.C.O. racketeering charges against the government all-stars for criminal failure to embrace federal law and multiply “The Reclamator.”
Murphy may have had the right idea regarding the need to send a broadside across the bow of corrupt government bureaucracy married to heavy industry (MWH). Yes, greener, cheaper onsite wastewater solutions are currently available that would be a far better fit for coastal, small-town Los Osos than a leaky, big-city raw-sewage pipeline through high groundwater with eventual $400 a month sewer bills.
But Murphy, more than “The Reclamator,” was not up to the task. He is simply the wrong messenger with the wrong motives. Who willingly wants to do business with him? After spending more than a year in Los Osos trying to sell his high-strung waste-to-water machine, Murphy came up bone dry. Not a single customer. Not a single testimonial. He offers no plausible evidence whatsoever of the competency of the man or his machine.
Only what suits him.
— Ed Ochs
