While acknowledging the water bills customer received this month may be higher than usual for a couple of reasons it maintains are legitimate, City Finance Director Perwez Moheet carefully and methodically outlined the city’s procedure for measuring and billing for residential water usage during Tuesday night’s city council meeting and concluded residents are invoiced accurately for the water they use.
Moheet said the latest bills customers received on Sept. 15 accounted for water usage between July 6 and Aug. 8, 33 days.
"We normally have 29 to 30 days" in a billing cycle, he told the council. "This one happens to have 33 days. This is the longest billing cycle in our fiscal year. Of those 33 days, 27 days were with 97-plus degrees with no precipitation. That’s 82 percent of the days in the total billing cycle. This included 10 days of 100-plus degree temperatures with two of those days being 106 degrees."
Moheet said residents who use automatic sprinkler systems to irrigate their lawns in the summer can use 16,000 to 20,000 gallons of water a month "very fast." Other typical causes for higher than normal water use, he said, include leaks in internal plumbing such as toilet flaps that have caught, are hung or have shrunk over time; faulty shower heads; faulty faucets; leaking faucets outdoors and indoors; leaking connections to clothes/dish washers; replacement of water heaters; swimming pool repairs; outdoor manual sprinklers that are inadvertently left on too long; and children playing with running water hoses.
"On automatic sprinkler systems, most people set them up to where they come on between midnight and 6 a.m.," Moheet said. "If you have a broken sprinkler head most people don’t see it until they get their bill. Just one broken sprinkler head can spew 200 gallons in one cycle. And if you have a number of those, it adds up pretty quickly.
"If a customer losers power, their irrigation control system reverts to the factory setting which is every day," he said. "So if the customer doesn’t catch that and update it, they will be using more water."
Moheet said during the August billing cycle, the average amount of water used per customer was 8,186 gallons. That compared to 7,424 gallons for the same month in 2016, which was a wetter year.
He also mentioned that Kyle, like many other municipalities, has a tiered water rate structure "that is designed to encourage water conservation." The first 4,000 gallons are billed at $4.40 per thousand gallons, the second 4,000 is $5.50, the third is $6.61, the fourth is $7.69, the fifth is $8.80 with a final increment for those who use 50,000 gallons or more in a month and they are charged $13.20 per 1,000 gallons.
After the meeting I posed a hypothetical to Moheet on a customer whose water usage for one month was 10,000 gallons. Specifically I asked whether he was billed (a) at the $4.40 rate for the first 4,000 gallons, the $5.50 rate for the second 4,000 and the $6.61 rate for the final 2,000 or (b) was the customer billed at the $6.61 rate for all 10,000. His answer was option (a).
"This customer’s water bill will total $86.05," Moheet said today. He said that total comes from adding $33.23, which is what he called the "minimum water charge," $17.60 for the first 4,000 gallons, $22 for the second 4,000 and $13.22 for the final 2,000. He said the customer’s water bill would be itemized to show the separate $33.23 for the minimum charge and a separate line item of $52.82 for the water usage charge.
"In this billing cycle we had 9,331 water meters that we read," Moheet told the council Tuesday night. "It’s electronic meter reading. The water meter has a device on top of it that sends an electronic signal to our meter reader that drives by neighborhoods and picks up signals. So there is no human touch of the meter reading in the process," a process, Moheet maintained, that eliminated the possibility of human error in meter readings. He said approximately 5,000 of the meters are west of I-35 and the remaining 4,300 are on the east side.
Moheet said the first thing that happens when the city receives those readings "is to catch those meter reads that show up as some anomaly." These could be zero reads or bad signals. He said meter technicians go to those locations to determine why meter readings were not recorded. "They then physically read the meters," Moheet said. "They actually open the meter box and they have the hand held device that they scan. They make sure the meter is not broken." Moheet said 90 percent of the times those faulty readings are the result of ant mounds, even rattlesnakes in the meter boxes or irrigation water that has flooded the meter boxes. "Se we clean all that out," he said. Moheet said of the 9,331 meters read last month, only 111 had to be re-read manually.
"So that’s the first cut," he said.
After that, the billing system searches for high and low, he said. Every month the system looks at a customer’s three-month average for the same three months in the prior year. "If it’s two and a half times less than or two and half times more than your last average it will spit it out for additional review," he said.
In all, he said, the system has 10 different such categories that it tests for.
"During non-summer months, we typically have about 800 accounts that we have to review based on these parameters," the finance director said. "For this billing cycle that we are talking about, we had 1,327. That’s because most of these were high-usage customers." Specifically, he reported, 679 were for high usage, 189 for low consumption, 233 for zero consumption and the rest for other miscellaneous reasons.
"Each one of those was looked at," he stressed. "It normally takes us three days to run these inspections and checks. It took us five days to run these. Every single one of them had a reason that their bill was approved."
Although Mayor Pro Tem Damon Fogley said he understood the city manager telling him the last audit of the city’s water billing system was in 2009, Moheet said the truth is the city is has been audited annually since 2004 by a company called Johnson Controls. Last year’s audit, he said, revealed a meter accuracy rate of 99.9 percent.
"Our meters are in good shape," he said. "We are above what the rating associations say is acceptable."
He said the meters that are pulled are sent to a certified laboratory with no connection to either the city of Kyle or Johnson Controls "and those results are then shared with us."
Moheet concluded by posing a question: "If the billing system or the meter equipment system had some gremlin in it, why does it only show up in the high usage months and then it normalizes? If there was a system error, then that anomaly would show every month."
Council member Travis Mitchell asked Moheet whether the billing could be adjusted so that a 32-day interval fell during periods of low water usage instead of during the summer months and Moheet said he would investigate whether the billing software could be reprogrammed to make that adjustment.
In a related item Tuesday, the council approved the expenditure of $374,579 for something that wasn’t clearly explained on the agenda but turns out is a system that unifies all the city’s computer-based accounting technologies into one system.
In other action citizens should be aware of, the council passed on final reading an ordinance that adds using a wireless device to "engage in a call" while operating a motor vehicle or bicycle in Kyle to the texting prohibitions already enacted by the state.
The council also approved zoning changes that would allow for an auto body shop to relocate from South Front Street to the corner of Rebel Road and Porter Street and for a medical facility to be built on the Dacy Loop.
No comments:
Post a Comment