NO FOOLING
Dear Customers and Shareholders:
The legal battle for Pennichuck Corporation has begun.
After 14 months of threats, the city of Nashua last week filed a “petition for valuation” with the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission, initiating a long, expensive and hostile attempt to take the assets of our company, the oldest continuously operating business in the Granite State.
In doing so, city leaders:
- worsened the city’s urgent financial crisis,“the biggest challenge (the) city has faced in the last 30 years;”
- ignored the immediate,disastrous impact of their extraordinary legal and consulting expenditures on the city’s education funding crisis, which could force the city to eliminate kindergarten, close an elementary school, and cut staff;
- committed to spending well over $1,000,000 of taxpayer money on fees for lawyers and consultants, with absolutely no assurance of the outcome;
- have grossly exceeded their authority under state law and continue to cause significant harm to Pennichuck Corporation and its subsidiaries;
- created irreversible money problems that will mean higher rates for taxpayers, water customers or both.
The city of Nashua will be hard-pressed to prove that taking our assets is in the “public good,” as it will be required to do, or that it can operate the water works better than Pennichuck has for the last 152 years.Equally important, the value of Pennichuck’s assets is far greater than any of the multiple values put forth by the city’s consultants over the past two years, amounts that, conveniently for their self-serving purposes, have become lower instead of higher as time goes by.
If the city’s million-dollar gamble with taxpayer money fails, as it is likely to do, or if the city turns away from the process when it finds out the true value of the property it is seeking to take, then it will be the taxpayers of Nashua who will have to pay the bills. In the unlikely event that the city ultimately prevails and decides to proceed with taking our assets, then water customers will end up paying these same costs through escalating rates.
We have made it clear that Pennichuck will fight the city’s hostile takeover attempt on every front and to the fullest extent possible.We are greatly encouraged by new research revealing that the majority of Nashua residents now oppose taking Pennichuck and strongly oppose the city spending more money on this effort.
But we think it’s regrettable and unfortunate that Nashua’s schoolchildren, taxpayers and water customers should have to bear the cost of the ill-considered actions of city leaders, now and for years to come.
Pennichuck Corporation
New Hampshire’s Oldest
Continuously Operating Business
April 1, 2004
