When the City raised our water rates last July, the City Manager failed to review the Ordinance which administers our water utility and have the Council amend the requirement that meters will be read “approximately 90 days apart” and “water service shall be billed on a quarterly basis”. In effect, the City is and has been in violation of Ordinance 90-8 for 8 months.
The Tillamook County Pioneer has investigated this matter and will be reporting in more detail in the coming days. While embarrassing, mistakes happen and there is a way to fix the problem after the fact with an Ordinance amendment to match the current monthly meter reads and billing. I suspect that the City Manager will rush to place an amending Ordinance before the Council, place an emergency clause on it so that it can go into effect immediately and try to get past this as soon as possible.
But is that a solution in the best interests of water customers? Monthly water reads and billings require more staff administration and clerical effort, increased processing costs by the City’s billing service all of which provides no benefit to the customer. How many CEOs in the private sector would recommend that the company increase service delivery costs which provide no customer benefits to its Board and expect the customer to be grateful?
What a monthly read and billing does do is increase the opportunity for the City to bill the tier surcharge each and every month that a customer exceeds the 2,000 gallon base water allotment now in effect. With City staff now increasing its workload with this self imposed busy work every month, the City can claim that these additional efforts justify taking more money as overhead expense to be transferred from the Water Fund to the General Fund. This now becomes the Water Fund’s contribution to the City’s new revenue diversification program.
The City told us that the monthly reads would promote water conservation. The Public Works Director has told the Council that we have plenty of water from our well sites. Another reason given was monthly billings would help customers more easily budget their household expenses. I would suggest that most water customers are responsible enough to manage their finances and budgets without this assistance from City Hall.
If you are one of those customers that has paid a monthly tier surcharge during these past 8 months, ask the City to recalculate your water usage on the legally required quarterly billing schedule and see if you are owed a credit for your total quarterly usage.
The Council continually reminds us that they are listening to what we want. Send them a quick email
at cityhall@ci.manzanita.or.us with the following message:
Unless you can provide a common sense reason as to why monthly billings are in my best interests, there is no need to amend the Ordinance language for water billings. I prefer to be billed quarterly and pay for what I use every 3 months. Let’s see who’s listening.
Randy Kugler
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