GILROY
– Since reading about Jenny Liu’s unexplained water bill for
98,000 gallons – about seven times her normal monthly usage – three
more Gilroy residents have gone public with their own, similar
water-bill complaints.
GILROY – Since reading about Jenny Liu’s unexplained water bill for 98,000 gallons – about seven times her normal monthly usage – three more Gilroy residents have gone public with their own, similar water-bill complaints.
They live nowhere near each other, but Tom Chilcote, Julie Gopp and Mark Zappa each claim to have had a one-time-only bill for much more than normal: Chilcote in August (like Liu), Gopp in July and Zappa at some point in the past two years. Each reported his or her situation to The Dispatch after reading an Oct. 30 story about Liu’s fight with the city.
“When I saw that in the paper, I looked at my wife and said, ‘I guess I’m not crazy,’ ” said Chilcote, who was billed for about 35,000 gallons – more than double his normal monthly use, he says.
At issue is whether the city should do more to diagnose the reasons for unusual water-usage spikes. Like Liu, Chilcote, Gopp and Zappa say they each asked city officials to look into the unexpected bill and got no satisfactory explanation.
Unlike Liu, each has paid his or her bill. Liu has threatened to take her case to small-claims court, not so much for the money, she says – the city already offered to drop her rate – as to fight the current water-billing policy.
Whatever amount of water goes through a meter, city officials say, residents have to pay for it. City water meters cannot err on the high side, both city officials and a representative of the manufacturer say. Plus, however much water passed through a person’s meter is water the city purchased from the Santa Clara Valley Water District, and it passes that cost on to the actual user.
“I don’t see it as our responsibility to tell them what they did with their water,” said city Administrative Services Director Michael Dorn, the official in charge of water billing.
Liu’s case has become a public-relations headache for the city, Dorn has admitted. City officials offered to lower her bill from $421 to $120 by dropping the rate per gallon to that for her normal usage (Rates go up as more water is used). They’re still charging her for 98,000 gallons, however, and Liu won’t pay it. Dorn says the city has the meter as evidence Liu did use that amount of water and no evidence that she didn’t.
Dorn says two additional people – not these three – have approached his office with water-bill complaints since hearing of Liu’s situation. On the advice of the city attorney, he declined to breach customer confidentiality by disclosing their names. As with Liu, the city offered these people a credit.
Another high August bill
Chilcote said he thinks something unusual was going on in August, if he and Liu both got abnormally high water bills for that month.
“I think it was about impossible we used that much water,” Chilcote said of the 35,000 gallons he was billed for. “They (the city) said, ‘Well, maybe it’s your landscaping. Your lawn is very green. Maybe you’re overwatering.’ I said, ‘I fertilize my lawn so I don’t have to overwater.’ ” Chilcote said he intentionally cut back on watering his lawn this summer in the interest of conservation. If a sprinkler or hose was left on accidentally, he said, he would have noticed flooding.
Dorn said it doesn’t take much additional sprinkler use – perhaps and extra hour or two – to double a house’s water usage. That may not be enough to flood a yard.
The only reasonable explanation Chilcote could propose is that water pressure was somehow higher at some houses at certain times. He wasn’t sure how to go about verifying this, however.
A 98,000-gallon bill in July
Gopp says her July bill was for 98,000 gallons, the same as Liu’s.
It’s not fair, she said, that the city never offered her a cut rate but reduced Liu’s bill after Liu wrote a letter of complaint to the San Jose Mercury News. With reluctance, Gopp and her husband paid their full $391 fee for July.
“My bill had been $9 before that,” Gopp said. “They told us we had no choice. … They said, ‘Our meters don’t lie.’ ”
Gopp and her husband put in a new lawn in the first half of July and admittedly used more water than normal then, but “There’s no way” they used 98,000 gallons, Julie Gopp said. Otherwise, she never watered her lawn for more than 20 minutes a day, she said – as she does now.
“We had no puddles of water in back or in front or going down the street,” Gopp said. “Our rates now are way under $100, even with a new lawn in,” Gopp said.
Dorn said the new lawn is probably the reason for the Gopps’ high bill. Watering a new lawn would use about three times as much water as normal, he estimated.
Zappa couldn’t remember when the bill was from and hadn’t located it in his records, but he’s almost sure it was also for 98,000 gallons. That’s why he was so struck by the story on Liu, he said.
After arguing the point with city officials at some length, Zappa said he caved in and paid the bill. He also paid the city $65 to inspect his meter, which the city found to be in working order. The crux was, he said, the next month’s bill was back to normal, and he hadn’t fixed anything.
“The city won’t back down,” he said. “Fighting it was impossible, but there was no possible way I could have used that much water, even if I had drained and refilled my pool, … even if my neighbors had filled their pools from my water.”
San Jose’s diagnostic team
The San Jose Water Co., a private utility big enough to serve a city of nearly a million people, has a specially trained water conservation staff that will conduct a “water audit” on someone’s home when a complaint cannot be explained at the meter, according to Customer Service Director Bob Day.
When someone reports an unusually high water bill, both Gilroy and San Jose water staff do the same thing first; they send a technician to the house to recheck the meter and check for a system leak by shutting off all water and seeing if the meter still registers any flow.
If no leak is evident, the meter reading is the same and the customer is still not satisfied, the San Jose Water Co. might send in its water conservation team to diagnose the problem.
“I would say that it’s pretty close to 75 percent of the time or more where we can actually figure out what happened,” Day said.
In Gilroy, a meter checker might check someone’s home for leaks if a system leak was showing on the meter at the time and if the resident invited the technician inside, Dorn said.
It’s often hard to reconstruct what happened four to six weeks after the high water use, Day said. If staff can’t explain the usage, the company might, as Gilroy does, offer to disassemble and inspect the meter. Day agreed that meters generally can’t run fast (They can run slow if they are old) but said he has heard of extremely rare cases where meters skipped numbers.
Residents can read their own water meter. While today’s meters utilize computer chips instead of mechanical counters, they still have visible numbers.
