The Austin Water Utility is in the process of hiring a firm with expertise in meter reading to do an audit that would consist of checking the readings of at least a thousand meters, utility director Greg Meszaros told council members Wednesday.
The audit is in response to the thousands of calls the city received this summer from customers who said the water usage reflected on their bills was abnormally high. Last month, the City Council Public Utilities Committee directed city officials to explore a review of meter readings.
Water utility officials have said unusually wet weather in May and June, followed by an unusually long dry stretch, led to the spike in water usage. They brushed off theories that some systemic issue – such as city-hired meter reading company Corix not doing its job correctly – was the root cause, saying the amount of water pumped matched the amount of water read by meters.
Council Member Ellen Troxclair, who had proposed the meter reading audit, said at Wednesday’s Public Utilities Committee meeting she was surprised to learn this week that the city auditor’s office had already done an audit of the water billing process.
The auditor’s report, which was released last year, said auditors reviewed 1,350 meter readings and found six errors, three of which were “significant.” Austin Energy, which runs the billing system for all the city’s utilities, “does not have a process to determine if reads are accurate,” the report said.
The report said Austin Energy flags water bills that are outside a certain range (historical usage multiplied by 25 percent for the low end and usage multiplied by 400 percent for the high end) but said this system means the overwhelming majority of bills are never reviewed by city staff members.
Elaine Kelly-Diaz, Austin Energy’s vice president of customer account management, told the Public Utilities Committee Wednesday that the city is still reviewing the range that determines which bills are flagged. The city has started a program for checking a sample of meters after Corix to make sure the meters can be read and were read accurately, Kelly-Diaz said.
Austin Energy is hiring a company to audit the billing system in response to the complaints about water bills.
At its meeting last month, the Public Utilities Committee also asked city officials to return with ideas about providing financial relief to customers who unexpectedly saw an anomalous increase in their bills, which would drive them into a higher, and more expensive, water rate tier. Meszaros said this practice doesn’t exist among other utilities but would “noodle on it a little more.”
Troxclair suggested “one-time cap,” so that a water bill above the range Austin Energy uses to flag bills would be capped at the higher end. For instance, if a resident received a bill for 80,000 gallons but the higher end of the range was 32,000, the city would only bill for 32,000 gallons. Troxclair said residents could perhaps only rely on the cap once over a certain period of years, so the city would catch more “mistakes” instead of benefitting those purposefully using more water and gaming the system.
