In 2017, Sharon Doerr, a now 84-year-old resident of Del Ray Manufactured Housing Community in Longview, started receiving notices that the city was about to shut off water service to her trailer home — not because she hadn’t paid her bills, but because her landlord had stopped paying his to the city while continuing to collect utility payments from tenants.
With a heat wave bearing down on a community of seniors, many with disabilities, Sharon reached out to NJP’s Longview office to ask for help.
NJP attorney Lisa Waldvogel filed suit immediately and obtained a court order directing Del Ray to pay the overdue balance and stay current. But the landlord, Larry Foster, violated the order — and when NJP secured a contempt finding, Foster appealed. The Court of Appeals reversed on a legal technicality.
NJP pressed on, eventually winning a second contempt ruling after Foster tried to evict Sharon in retaliation, alleging her trailer encroached outside her rented lot (in a home that had sat in the same spot for years), and for running an energy healing practice out of her home.
The harassment took a real toll. “I never knew when the landlord would hit me with another infraction,” Sharon says. The uncertainty was relentless — notices on her door, repeated court appearances, the constant threat of eviction with nowhere to go.
“It didn’t occur to me that people could be that unethical,” Sharon says.
Persistence Pays Off
Sharon’s attorney stayed with the case through years of stalls, more than a dozen new lawyers hired and fired by Foster, and dead ends. When Foster died and his family moved to sell the property, Lisa recognized an opening: a prospective buyer faced a $1 million tax penalty if the sale didn’t close by year’s end, and NJP held critical leverage. They pursued it, and in December 2025, Foster’s family agreed to settle the case for $38,000 in compensation to Sharon.
“What a totally unexpected ‘gift’ this settlement is,” Sharon says. “God blessed me with more ‘seed money’ than I’ve ever had in my life. I grew up in farm country in Nebraska and my spirit literally ‘sees’ sacks of seed corn when I think of this.”
Sharon plans to use part of the settlement to preserve a library of audio recordings by a mentor in the healing arts — work she intends to make available to people seeking support for addiction, parenting, and personal healing.
“There’s always a seed of blessing in everything,” Sharon says. “It took much longer than I ever expected. But nothing would have happened without Lisa’s persistence. She did things no one else would have done.”