The city council voted 5-2 last night to allow a company that wants to replace most of the residential water meters in Kyle to conduct a test that it says will prove residents are not paying enough for the water they use.
The company, Honeywell International, Inc., claims the city is essentially distributing 136 million gallons of free water every year to residents due to faulty water meters.
Public Works Director Harper Wilder pushed back on that notion, however, telling the council that, for the last 15 years, the city has used an independent third party, Johnson Controls, to randomly test 50 water meters each year for accuracy and, each year, those tests have shown the meters are at least 97 percent accurate. And Finance Director Perwez Moheet said in every instance in which a customer complains about an abnormally high water bill, that customer’s meter is also pulled and sent out for an independent test and, in every single one of those instances, the meters have reported to be accurate. Moheet said in those instances, the city sent the meters to a different company, not Johnson Controls, to be tested, but he did not identify the company.
Honeywell claimed, however, that the problem is not with those few customers who are complaining about abnormally high water bills, but with the majority of customers who are not paying for all the water they actually use each month.
It’s worth noting that Honeywell International and Johnson Controls are direct competitors.
It’s also worth noting that the city’s contract with Johnson Controls has expired and the five council members who voted to approve the $29,000 contract with Honeywell (Mayor Travis Mitchell and council member Dex Ellison voted against it) said in essence that the study Honeywell wants to conduct would essentially be this year’s version of the study Johnson Controls has conducted for the last 15 years, just with 15 fewer meters being tested.
Honeywell representatives told the council it would not be conducting the testing, but would simply be selecting the 35 meters to be tested and then sending those meters to an independent testing company. Honeywell, however, balked at the idea that the city should select that independent tester, and council member Robert Rizzo, who sponsored Honeywell’s bid for the contract, defended Honeywell saying many companies have built relationships of trust with outside vendors.
Honeywell said that the accuracy of the meters currently in place in Kyle diminishes drastically after five years of use. It also said some of the most serious inaccuracies were found in multi-family meters. The meters monitoring the water use of commercial customers, according to Honeywell, appear to be fairly accurate and it attributed that to the fact that many of those meters are less than five years old.
Honeywell is hoping its study, the results of which must come back to the council within 90 days, will demonstrate the need to replace the current Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) meters with Automated Meter Infrastructure (AMI) meters that, among other advancements, could detect water leaks within a minute of when they begin.
City Manager Scott Sellers said the main problem with the AMR meters is that "it's a once a month system. Our biggest issue is when a customer has a leak we don't find out about it for 30 days." He said AMI allows antennas to be placed throughout the city that can immediately detect leaks and report them to the city.
Wilder admitted the newer meters are superior when it comes to detecting leaks, but maintained it’s an open question as to whether they are more accurate in measuring water usage than the current meters.
What the city council hopes to determine is whether the city is losing enough revenue due to under-billing residential customers to pay for the cost of replacing all the residential meters.
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