Figure on water bill a mistake

About 25,000 San Antonio Water System customers might have noticed something odd about their January bill.

Near the bottom of the bill is the household water usage for that month — typically a few thousand gallons. Below that, the customer can compare his or her household water usage to that of the neighbors, as well as other SAWS customers across the city.

The averages are designed to help consumers judge their water use compared to others, perhaps resulting in less water-wasting.

“No one wants to be the outlier,” said Gavino Ramos, a SAWS spokesman. “It simply reinforces the conservation mindset.”

But the averages listed on the January bill, which covers mostly December usage, came out a lot larger than usual.

More than a million gallons larger. The good news is this didn’t affect how much the customer had to pay.

“The error is in a report that is only provided as a reference for customers,” Ramos said. “It did not affect customers’ billed amounts.”

The error was due to a mistake in dates used for the monthly comparison calculations. For those whose bills were affected, the citywide and neighborhood averages actually are the combined total for every year since 2001.

Only customers in a certain billing cycle saw the error, accounting for about 25,000 customers located mainly south of Loop 410 and north of downtown, bordered on the west by I-10 and U.S. 281 on the east.

“We knew immediately there must have been a data entry error,” Ramos said. “We corrected that error, reviewed the past bills that were sent and double-checked the next batch of bills, which were set to be delivered.”

The glitch largely went unnoticed, but did raise a few eyebrows and prompted at least one customer to call SAWS and ask what happened.

Though the average water use for all SAWS residential customers for that billing cycle was stated to be about 1.5 million gallons, in reality it was 6,938 gallons.