City fielding water bill complaints
City officials addressed complaints of high-priced water bills customers blamed on newly installed water meters at the July 28 regularly scheduled city council meeting. They stated high bills were not due to misread water meters.
The City of Graham announced last month the meter replacement project, which installed meters read by computer, had been completed with the majority of meters going online June 15. Bills were processed July 15 and sent out to customers July 25. City Manager Brandon Anderson said residents in Graham then began to approach the city with concerns over higher-than-normal bills.
“We just met with Ferguson (Mueller, the company that provided the new meters) this morning,” Anderson said at the July 28 meeting. “They informed us our system is reading better than any system they have put in the ground … We’ve got above a 99-percent accuracy in the readings right now and we are still wrapping up a few of the large meters and a few of the meters that have been hard to locate.”
The city replaced 4,000 meters, Anderson said. If customers have problems with their bills or meters, he said they should inform city hall in case the problem could be a leak.
“If someone asks you a question or has a concern about their water meter, please send them to city hall,” Anderson said. “We would be happy to show them their account. … With the new technology we can tell when it’s reading and how much; for instance, yesterday a watering cycle on someone’s sprinkler system, we could tell when it was on and it used 1,100 gallons in one hour, it used 900 gallons in the next hour, and for four-and-a-half hours it watered like that at a 1,000 gallons per hour. So, it can rack up pretty quick and that’s what we hoped to get out of this system and it is alarming to a few folks,” Anderson said.
The new water meter system allows a wireless signal to transmit a reading from each meter every hour and give the city graphical data of water usage by customer. On Wednesday, the city had three complaints which, after analyzing the data from the new water meter system, revealed leaks.
“A lot of people come in and if your water readings never bottom out and in the middle of the night you are not using water, it should go to zero in an hour,” Anderson said. “One of them was reading 10 gallons every hour all the time, one of them was up to 60, so she called angry because she had a high water bill, but by the end of the conversation she was tickled that we had helped her locate the fact she had a leak.”
At Thursday’s meeting, Mayor Jack Graham said one of the main reasons for the drastic change in bills was the way the billing structure was being formulated after the city found out in November its meters were not giving accurate readings…
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