A $45,000 water bill has an Atlanta property owner and the city’s water department pointing fingers at each other, and so far the city isn’t budging.
Warren Borders insisted to Channel 2 Action News that he's not responsible for the massive bill, which extends back to November of last year.
Borders said he’s been trying to get the city’s Department of Watershed Management to correct the bill since then. That's when he began getting $3,000 to $7,000 statements for a vacant three-bed room home on Meldon Avenue.
Borders blamed the bill on a bad water meter. The city suspected a ground leak on the property.
"We called and said,‘Nobody's even in the property. What's going on?’” Borders told Channel 2. “All we got from them was, ‘Oh, you could have a leak.’"
Borders insisted there was no leak and even if there had been, a leak wouldn’t cause such a huge bill, he said.
A water department investigation, however, showed a new water line had been installed -- an indication that a leak possibly had been repaired -- and the city’s own meter had been switched out for another one.
Borders told Channel 2 he does not know who changed the meter.
“Right now our standing is that the [previous] meter was reading accurately, and there is no reason to do an adjustment of the bill,” Watershed Management spokeswoman Janet Ward said Tuesday. “Everything that we know is that the water was used, and he’s responsible for that.”
Ward said a crew was at the property on Tuesday to install a new “data collecting” meter to replace the one some else had installed.
Rather than cutting service to the property months ago, the city allowed it to continue. Ward said the dispute was during a period when the city was trying to resolve many complaints about extremely high bills
The city earlier this year sampled around 9,000 water meters for accuracy and found that 96 percent of the time, they transmitted accurate billing data. In a quarter of the cases, however, antennas used to transmit that information were improperly installed.
Ward said Borders’ bill isn’t the highest ever disputed, but it is the only one she can remember involving a home where the meter has been replaced by someone outside her department.
“We just don’t know where the meter is,” she said.
If customers want to dispute a bill they can call Watershed Management’s customer service line at 404-658-6500. Ward said “in general” the bill will be put on hold and service won’t be interrupted while the dispute is investigated.
The customer, however, is expected to pay something toward the outstanding bill until it is resolved.
Ward said records show that in Borders’ case, the customer paid just $87 toward the $45,000 bill -- $80 of which went toward a deposit.
“We do expect you to pay something every month,” Ward said, “not the whole bill, but something.”
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