$2,500 for water? A stuck meter is to blame

Hollywood customers mistakenly underbilled

Amy Wang gasped as she read the letter: She owed Hollywood’s Department of Public Utilities $12,416.

Her water meter had been stuck at zero for 58 months.

“I got home Sunday night and opened the letter and read it and I felt paralyzed. I just stared at it in disbelief,” Wang said.

She and about 169 other customers were under-billed and noware getting corrected bills. To make it manageable, customers will get up to 60 months to pay and the city will offer a 50 percent discount, said city spokeswoman Raelin Storey.

Many customers, like Wang, used autopay for their utility bill, which includes water, sewer and trash fees. It may explain why some residents didn’t realize their bills were unusually low.

A typical water bill in Hollywood would run about $122 a month for using 700 cubic feet of water, but if the meter isn’t working, the same billwould be only about $50, Storey said.

After Wang contacted the city, officials apologized for a clerical error. The amount owed at her Cleveland Street homewas actually $2,500.

“It was a relief, but at the same time I’m wondering, ‘how could this happen?’” Wang said.

The utilities department realized something was amiss after it switched to an advanced billing software system in January 2015, Storey said. The staff soon realized that some accounts were showing zero consumption. When they checked some meters, the discovered that they were stuck.

The faulty meters were replaced and then staff calculated how much each home owed, using the average monthly usage over the previous 12 months. By law, the city must make an effort to recoup the money, which totaled $700,000, Storey said.

“It’s in the taxpayers’ best interest,” she said.

Last month, the letters started going out, informing customers of the mistake. The highest bill, $140,000, went to a 24-unit condominium complex, or about $5,800 for each unit. The smallest bill was $20 for a single month, at a singlefamily home.

The glitches are the latest in a series of problems with the city’s water system that serves approximately 46,000 residential customers.

Hollywood spent almost $7 million in 2008 on hightech water meter transmitters, devices designed to electronically send water usage amounts from homes to city hall for billing. But those units, guaranteed for 15 years, could not withstand the heat, humidity and wet conditions of South Florida and most of them failed.

Thecity is currently in negotiations with the company that supplied those devices, A clara Technologies, and expects the system to be upgraded by next fall at no cost to the city, Storey said.

And in 2010, about 4,000 people, or 10 percent of customers, saw their bills double or triple after new water meters were improperly installed.

Storey said the city has been working to eliminate all glitches.

“This is why we’ve invested significantly over the last several years,” she said.