Questions surround $19k water bill
Councillor says city allowed charges to grow for four years before alerting homeowner
Wayne Thomson has spent a long time at Niagara Falls city hall, but he’d never seen someone handed a $19,000 water and sewer bill.
Now he has.
“That’s why I said at the council meeting (on Tuesday), this is without exception my most amazing and alarming situation that I’ve seen with the city in a long time,” said Thomson, a city councillor and former mayor.
Staff is looking into it and will report back later. Thomson didn’t want to identify the property owner until staff has investigated.
The issue, he said, is one of oversight: How was the unpaid bill allowed to grow for four years before the homeowner was alerted?
“They should be monitoring it,” said Thomson, who worked for the health department for 28 years and said he regularly heard from people warned to pay their utility bills or lose their service.
“If it’s two or three or four months in arrears, that’s when you move in to cut it off, or tell them pay up or we’ll cut it off. I don’t have a problem with that.”
He said the homeowner was away at school for a time and rented the house to a single parent. The understanding, Thomson said, was the renter was responsible for paying the water bill.
The homeowner came to him, he said, after receiving the
$19,000 bill for four years worth of water and sewer service.
Thomson said a solicitor hired by the city reviewed it and decided the city could only bill for two years’ back service, not four.
“So they called me and said they looked after it, and they sent him a bill for $11,000 for water for two years,” Thomson said. “I couldn’t believe it.”
The renter, whom Thomson did not identify, “has no ability to pay the bill.”
He said the city should accept
some of the blame and absorb at least some of the unpaid fee. The homeowner showed him his latest bill, for one month of water, and it was only $114.
“I tried to go through the system, unsuccessfully, at city hall and that’s why I brought it up,” Thomson said. “I don’t like to bring those things up at council, but I had no choice. I was at a dead end.”
Chief administrative officer Ken Todd was reluctant to comment on Thomson’s complaint for privacy reasons, saying it was “a little disappointing” to hear it come out at council.
“There are a lot of circumstances that come into play,” he said, adding it’s a complex matter and staff is trying to get to the bottom of it.
“The $19,000 bill is really only $8,000 or $9,000 in water charges, there is a sewer surcharge on there as well. It’s a sewer and water bill, not just a water bill.”