A Madison man whose former employer, the Anson-Madison Water District, accused him of locking its board of trustees out of its email and business software accounts last week is again facing charges stemming from accusations that he illegally sold former water lines.
The Somerset County grand jury indicted former superintendent Michael Corson, 52, on Feb. 24 on two felony counts of Class B and Class C theft, District Attorney Maeghan Maloney said Tuesday. The indictment was initially under seal due to a warrant being issued, but is now public, Maloney said.
The Somerset County sheriff’s office previously arrested Corson, and another former water district employee, Michael Jordan, for allegedly selling old water lines for scrap metal and pocketing over $12,000 in proceeds instead of returning the funds to the utility agency.
The district attorney’s office later decided against moving forward with those charges while it investigated the defense Corson’s attorney put forward, Maloney said, adding her office had never dropped Corson’s charges.
“Upon completion of that investigation, I gave all the information to the grand jury which returned an indictment with two counts,” she said.
A date for Corson’s arraignment has not been set. There is no current case against Jordan, but the district attorney’s office has six years to bring charges against him before the statute of limitations runs out, Maloney said.
Corson had worked at Anson-Madison Water District as superintendent since June 1995, according to his LinkedIn profile. The district fired him and Jordan on Nov. 29 after an investigation into accusations that they were selling the district’s former water lines for scrap.
The district filed a lawsuit against Corson in federal court last week, accusing him of hamstringing its operations by locking trustees out of the district’s official email account, Amazon account, his former work-issued cell phone and three other business software applications after his firing and changing the settings so that only he could reset the passwords.
Corson denied that he still had access to those accounts, according to the lawsuit.
The district is asking a judge to find that Corson violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and to pay for damages that it has incurred as a result of his alleged actions, which they estimated to be $5,000 after hiring cybersecurity experts from the Maine Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to bypass Corson’s settings.
The district fired the rest of its employees in December and contracted with the Maine Rural Water Association to manage its operations.
Corson’s attorney, Darrick Banda of Augusta, refuted Maloney’s account, stating that the district attorney’s office reneged on its decision not to move forward with charges following a “public backlash.”
He said the district attorney’s decision to go forward with the charges on Feb. 24 was “politically motivated.”
“We are baffled by the 360-degree reversal in the decision to prosecute our client,” Banda said. “Mr. Corson has not committed any crime. We believe this prosecution is merely an attempt to save face with the voters who were upset by the previous announcement that charges had been dropped.”
