Manistee Water Rate Jumps Tenfold for Some Customers

[XLFD]

If you owned a business that used a fair amount of water each month, paid your water bills regularly for years at everyone's usual rate then found that your water bill jumped ten times higher, how would you react?

Over two weeks ago it was revealed that some Manistee businesses may have been undercharged dramatically for water service in this FOX 17 article.  In the article, a Manistee Laundromat owner says that in the seven year's he's owned the business, he's paid around $200 to $300 each month for water.  But in December, he got a bill for $1,500.  "I may have been given faulty information from the previous owner and made a bad judgement to buy the place based on bad information because of this bad meter or computer flaw," the Laundromat owner  said.

It appears that the meters for at least a dozen businesses would only read the first four digits of the number of gallons used, so if you used 25,000 gallons a month it would only show that you used 2500, effectively a factor of ten less.  This is the explanation the City of Manistee used, although they can't explain how they can tell that the business actually used only 2500 rather than 25,000. 

Last night, TV 9 & 10 News reported

"A water billing issue in Manistee is growing.  We first reported on this last month.

Earlier this year the city discovered some water meters were not correctly recording how many gallons of water customers actually used.  The discrepancy was undercharging accounts by about 90 percent.

At first they thought it was just a couple of meters, but now they've discovered about a dozen places were affected.  To correct the problem, some water customers are seeing a huge jump in their water bill.  The Department of Public Works director says the billing software was only reading four digits instead of five on the meters.

Basically if a business used 10,000 gallons a month, the system only recorded 1,000.  The city corrected this error -- and now the bills in question have skyrocketed.

"When looked at it I thought it couldn't be right, I thought it was somebody else's bill," said Dan Kamaloski, owner of Salt City Car Wash in Manistee.  Car washes and laundromats use a lot of water.  Their owners are shocked.

"Our average bills were probably $300 and the new bill was almost $2,000, so it's quite a jump," he said.  Dan says he's owned his car wash for three years, and has never seen a drastic bill decrease or increase like this.  He's not sure how his business will do if it stands.

"If this bill is accurate and we have to pay this bill every month or whatever, business as usual will probably not have enough to pay this bill," he said. 

The DPW is willing to work with the affected customers.  But they strongly believe these new bills are right.

"They're paying the correct consumption amount just like every other customer in the water system and have paid much reduced rates since their meters were installed," director Jeff Mikula.

They don't know exactly how long it's been or how much money the city lost.

"I don't have the numbers in front of me but it's been tens of thousands of dollars," Mikula said.

"I'm just hoping that they'll work with me resolve the issue to where were both happy with the outcome," Kamaloski said.

The DPW will continue their audit this spring and then present their findings to the city council.  The city expects affected customers to pay the increased bills."

This expectation by the City of Manistee is rather ridiculous, barring the installation of new meters at the affected businesses and charging for actual readings thereafter.  This is a mistake made by the City's water plant intelligentsia for many, many years and should have been caught at one of these dozens establishments if the billing records somehow went down tenfold when they put in the defective meters. 

The Laundromat owner and others may have made business decisions of permanent nature when they had water service much less.  On has to figure if the Laundromat goes from $200-300 to $1500, an increase in magnitude of about six, that maybe something else is off-- like their new method of calculation.  f the problem is as they say, the difference should be a factor of ten.

Manistee, like Ludington, have devoted a lot of money away from their needed infrastructure repairs to non-essential and frivolous purposes, and need to come up with a lot of money to get their water systems compliant with minimal standards.  This neglect will end up costing both cities in the long run, and is already understood by much of the citizenry paying attention.

[XLFD]

The citizen-friendly Mayor Pro-Tem JW Smith has released a statement about the issue on his website, it seems reasonable and concludes: 

"I inquired as to if we (the city) knew how much water was provided each billing period (pumped and treated) and was told that data is available. I don’t understand how we could have that number, and when compared to the amount billed, not notice a discrepancy. It would seem to me some sort of audit would be periodically conducted to identify disparities in production versus billing for service."

[Willy]

How in the World can there be such a large amount of undercharging going on without any City official noticing. For seven years at that. Manistee needs to revamp their billing system.