Couple fights $23,000 power debt run up by marijuana-growing tenant

A lawsuit involving 50 goats, 100 chickens, an elderly couple, a power utility and marijuana appears headed toward trial this month.

Felipe and Maria Ruelas, ages 75 and 70, were surprised last year to learn, after a raid by authorities, that a new tenant had been growing marijuana in a south Modesto house they own.

The couple were dismayed that the tenant had been stealing electricity from the Turlock Irrigation District to feed the pot house, siphoning scads of power in only seven weeks.

The Ruelases were stunned when TID sent them a bill for $23,000.

And then came the kicker: If they didn’t pay, TID – which had disconnected the south Modesto house – would shut off power to their Hughson home as well.

The couple, a daughter-in-law and three grandchildren occupy that home and rely on electricity for lights, heat, the fridge and more. The goats and chickens would perish without groundwater supplied by an electric pump, Felipe Ruelas said when asking a judge for an urgent ruling ordering TID to keep the lights on.

“TID’s threat to disconnect electrical service at the (Hughson) property is despicable,” Modesto attorney George Rodarakis wrote in the plea. “TID is merely seeking to exploit this elderly, retired couple into paying an unsubstantiated charge under the threat of being displaced.”

A judge granted the request for the time being, but the legal fight has just begun.

Felipe Ruelas had not removed his name as TID’s customer at the south Modesto house on Amador Avenue since first renting it out for $850 a month in November 2012, initially to a previous tenant and then to the apparent pot farmer. In TID’s eyes, Ruelas was “the only customer of record,” a court document says.

Alerted to the indoor marijuana grow in February 2014, TID found an illegal splice diverting power without being recorded by a meter, a common but dangerous condition in electricity theft. The district “made a reasonable estimate of the unauthorized use of electric service” from the time Ruelas signed up 15 months before, according to TID, and billed him $23,000.

But Ruelas said he and others had inspected the house just before the pot farmer moved in, only seven weeks earlier, and found so sign of electrical tampering. He figured that the most his recent tenant could have stolen in seven weeks amounted to about $3,000, and he paid that amount.

When TID continued demanding another $20,000, he and his wife sued, saying TID provided no justification for its estimate. It’s not fair to threaten displacing a family from a home where power bills are paid up, they say in the lawsuit. Also, TID rendered the south Modesto house “useless and uninhabitable” by refusing to restore electricity there, the lawsuit says, exposing it to “vagrancy and vandalism” because the family cannot sell or rent it to someone else.

TID’s repeated threats “constitute elder financial abuse,” the document reads, asking a judge to determine who owes whom how much.

“It’s of interest to me from a human standpoint,” Rodarakis said. “That’s why I took on this case.”

Indoor marijuana cultivation, legal or otherwise, is nothing new. The federal Drug Enforcement Agency found nearly 400,000 indoor plants in 2014 – a sliver compared to the nearly 4 million illegally grown outdoor plants the agency seized in raids. A current indoor trend is extracting the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis plants using volatile compounds that can explode, the agency says.

Such activity should not be confused with cultivation that complies with state medical marijuana laws, including a regulatory act signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in October. That has spurred some cities to look into restrictions, including Modesto, Turlock, Ceres and Riverbank, with votes expected in coming weeks, some limiting growing to small areas overseen by qualified patients and caregivers.

Stealing power isn’t unusual either, grabbing headlines from time to time. Pot house operators typically rent a home and install huge power-sucking lights in some or all rooms, often requiring extra cooling fans and air conditioning that also require huge amounts of electricity for which crooks would rather not pay.

TID, with 98,000 electricity customers, found 67 so-called diversions in 2015 – not all combined with pot houses, of course – costing the district about $380,000. The Modesto Irrigation District, with 115,000 customers, detected nearly 200, costing $500,000.

TID spokeswoman Michelle Reimers said she could not comment on the Ruelas case. Speaking generally of power theft, she said, “Our biggest issue is safety. The other issue is, when energy is diverted, everyone has to pay – all customers.”

After the Ruelases sued, TID fired back with a cross-complaint, saying Felipe Ruelas is responsible and that the theft was “willful and intentional.” Citing state law allowing triple damages, Ruelas now owes TID $69,000, plus unspecified attorneys’ fees, the document says.

Although TID policy allows thefts to be referred to the district attorney for criminal prosecution, no such action has been filed.

The case is set for trial Jan. 20.

“We’re not letting down, and they’re standing firm, so far,” Rodarakis said.

This story was originally published January 3, 2016 at 10:18 AM with the headline "Couple fights $23,000 power debt run up by marijuana-growing tenant."