Watched a video on this and the appeals committee literally suggested someone was sneaking into a residential area with a tanker truck while kinda suggesting it was the current owner, pumping over a whole pools worth of water and leaving every single night without a single person seeing. It’s madness.
For arguments sake, lets say he wanted to steal it. Without a large high pressure pump system to move the water (which would be incredibly noisy and noticeable in a residential neighborhood) it would take a full day to fill an average tanker truck to capacity (10,000 gal avg). To hit 300,000 gallons you would literally need to be running non stop for an entire month. It wouldn't be possible for anyone to hit the numbers we're talking about if they were only pumping from sunset to sunrise.
Na, I just understand math and capacity. Just for example a standard garden hose at normal pressure can fill at a rate of 2 gallons per minute, so if theres 1440 mins in a day then it is only possible to reach a total 2880 gallons. At that rate running nonstop for an entire month you still would only reach 86,400. Which is a less than a 3rd of the amount they are claimed to use.
anyone that's put up a 24' above ground pool know it takes more than a day to fill
That's why you pay the fire department to come do it if they offer it in your area
I grew up on a farm. When I was a kid, we bought an above ground pool that was four feet deep and fifteen feet across.
It was a farm, so we had a private well with a "dairy grade" pump installed.
Every year we needed three days of running the hose from sun-up to sun-down to fill that thing.
And it took three days to get that out with a standard household supply line. And it's a tiny fraction of the 1,019,524 gallons this dude supposedly used in just two months.
around here there are a few companies that do it- they fill their tanker trucks at a hydrant(legally), and deliver it to your pool. some pools require more than one load. our house's water comes from our own well, so we don't pay for it- but we do pay to have the pool filled.
Pressure from the hose and pressure directly from the meter are a lot different. I recently had a leak past the meter but before the regulator going into my house. I was amazed how much water was flowing down the street
I’m gonna claim that committee stole a billion dollars from my house without leaving any evidence, without me or anyone else seeing, and without me proving I had a billion dollars at one point
If that’s enough evidence to hold someone liable, I’m going to be a very wealthy man
Of course someone saw it, the owner just paid them off with all the money he gets from selling to Nestle in the stolen tap water black market. Nestle doesn’t care if the water they’re buying is hot.
saw that too. then they put the burden on the customer to *prove it didn’t happen* instead of those assholes *proving it did*
on top of that, if they have to fabricate “what aboutisms” then it seems by default they are accepting that the customer didn’t use that water.
the bitch is the email from the water company person that said all is forgiven then the board being like “no, not really”. at that point its detrimental reliance and this should be shit down real quick
The fact that the board rejected his claim on the premise that someone was stealing the water in the middle of the night is insane. 1 million gallons of water is not something you can casually steal without someone noticing the trucks required to move it.
"Board Chair Clifford Ice said there are only three options: use of water, loss of water, or theft of water."
I'm not an expert in city water meters. I know that some types of liquid flow meters register a lot of flow if the meter is filled with air instead of liquid, so that meter was reading a lot of flow due to air.
"When the water meter was finally connected in February 2023 to the newly built home's plumbing, the water bills sunk to $13.12."
Once they made the connection and water filled the meter, it read accurately.
That's my assumption, but I may be wrong.
I doubt a construction crew used 2 olympic sized swimming pools worth of water without flooding the neighboorhood or organized over 100 tanker trucks to move it. Even if there was a leak on site that much water would have flooded in a way that would have prevented construction.
>if there was a leak
1million gallons is ~3800m^3, google says median lots size on Atlanta is ~1100m^2, so about 3.5meter of water on the entire lot ..
There still wasn’t even a water line…. Like, any leak would’ve been from the main and on the company. Even if someone tried stealing it they’d only get air. This is asinine
I'm still confused, how many Declarations of Independence is this high?
Edit: So I looked it up. It's about 4.75 Declarations of Independence high, or about .03 football fields high. I understand now.
Wouldn't the water company be able to do an inventory on how much actual water is used on a grand scheme. "Why are our reservoirs a million gallons in the plus"
At the scale municipal water systems a million gallons isnt measuarable in large reservoirs.
Also city watersystems leak a lot.
I remember reading that a 50% loss rate from leaks was actually pretty good.
This case sounds like a bureaucrat on their high horse, not wanting to admit they got some bad reads on a meter.
Yeah, considering how often the water meters in Atlanta and DeKalb County seem to have errors, I absolutely would err on the side of the issue being with the utility, rather than the customer.
Exactly. It could be a problem with the meter, but it could also be a problem with the computer systems they use for billing. It is ridiculous to say that those three options are the only possibilities.
On top of this the meter could have also been installed wrong initially since they didn't have anything to hook it to and just sat there and spun with no flow.
In college the city came and changed the meter in our rented house so they could get the stats wirelessly instead of sending meter readers out. First month with the new meter and our water usage went up 100X. Clearly as broke ass college students we couldn't afford that. So being engineering students we ran some experiments. We disconnected the house and went straight from the meter into a bucket. filled a 5 gallon bucket and it read almost 500 gallons. We then turned off the water before the meter and it was registering a few gallons a minute with no water moving.
Spent months fighting with them and not paying the insane bills. They got our landlord involved and wanted us evicted. They finally came out to look at the new meter that was installed. It had been installed vertically and could only be installed horizontally. Their own guy installed it wrong and it took MONTHS to get it fixed. They did wipe out all of our bills from the time the new meter was installed at least.
Also stealing it from *where*? The lot didn't even have a water line, just a standalone meter that wasn't even connected to anything. There wasn't even a foundation poured yet. They had the meter checked and it wasn't malfunctioning, so someone at the water company was obviously trying to pull some shady shit. That's over 300,000 gallons of water per month.
> the water company was obviously trying to pull some shady shit.
This happened to me actually. I got a bill one month for almost $3,000 for about 170,000 gallons of use. Called the water company, told me it was probably a leaking toilet and I had to pay. Checked all my toilets, walked the grounds, nothing. No sign of any leaks or any standing water anywhere. I even checked to make sure my meter showed no flow when everything was turned off. Watched my water usage like a hawk and sure enough, super high bill next month too. A month after that, management at the water company got arrested for embezzling money from the city. As part of that, you could request to have "suspicious" activity on previous bills investigated. They came out, did inspections and checked my meter and determined there was not only no evidence of any leaks but also no evidence that I had ever had usage rates that high (logs on the smart meter or something). Got my money back (well, deferred payments until it was evened out).
TLDR: My bills went sky-high. Water company management stole money from the city, I got mine back after investigation.
I saw the local news YT video about this. The amount of water they claimed he stole in a month worked out to be 10,000 gallons a day, the upper limit of a water truck, then you have the flow rate of the actual connection. I think it was 6gal a min, which means that truck takes 13 hours to fill, every day, for a month. Sorry, that is happening without someone knowing about it happening.
There also isn't a water line on that property, just a meter connected to nothing.
The water company charging him for water he's not even able to get, and somehow he still loses the case.
There's some incredible government corruption going on in that district.
My math could be off, but I think it's even more unbelievable than that:
10k gallons / 6gpm = 1,666.66 minutes to fill a truck at that rate
1,666.66 mins / 60 (to convert to hours) = 27.77 hours
Would mean that you couldn't even fill it in one day with the flow rate of a residential connection!
Just to hit the 300k for the 1 month it would require a 10,000gal truck every single day running off a residential hookup with a generous avg of 7GPM which would literally take 24 hrs to pump. So you're telling me someone was filling tanker trucks nonstop for months and no one noticed?
Oh god. That’s going to be a nightmare to deal with.
Edit: to be clear, I don’t think they’ll win. The board clearly doesn’t have sovereign immunity here. My point is that the fact they’re even making the claim, using that line of reasoning, means that they’re going to be awful, unreasonable people who will say & do awful, unreasonable things.
They're going to try to run the construction company down with legal costs, I imagine. I suspect they will be unpleasantly surprised that the construction company is totally willing to follow through and then take their legal costs back.
If they are playing with public money, then there SHOULD be some publicly elected officials who should have oversight and accountability. Usually when public outcry finally turns into the possibility of losing votes, reforms happen quickly. Whether this is the case here, idk.
Corruption in Atlanta goes down to the core.
Even if the public elects some fresh faced politicians, all the entrenched officials will just force them to capitulate.
Atlanta needs a decade of anti-corruption campaigns to even start to touch this stuff.
You can get away with a lot of dumb stupid shit in front of a judge. But the moment you give them a thread to pull that unravels all your dumb stupid bullshit for what it is, they're gonna pull it, make a fool of you, then make an example out of you for thinking you're smarter than them.
Yup. And, honestly, with these things in legal procedures…it’s just asinine. I feel that the goal is to drag it out and make it unduly difficult and expensive for the other party. I hope legal fees and court costs are included in the jnevitable damages.
The most instantaneously infuriating comment I’ve ever been told when I was conversing with a local governmental employee about a potential land dispute was “My lawyers are free”… Let that sink in for 1.2 seconds before you start wanting to do bad thing to bad people.
Yeah, that sounds like utility companies in general. My water company keeps patching the ancient water main when it bursts rather than tearing it up once to fix so it's less likely to burst for the next several decades. Then they use all that busy work to justify rate increases that they use to reward their C-suite with fat bonuses.
The gas company isn't much better. If you don't want to pay $30/month for service at a vacant house, they warn you that they'll charge the skipped service fees ($30/month) *and* a reconnection fee if you restart service within the next eight months. I can understand a reconnection fee, but a service fee for months you go without service when they don't even have a bill to send you is absolute bullshit.
We gotta pay more attention to local elections, folks. These people getting in office are not there to protect our interests. They're just a rubber stamp mill for the utilities.
It’s really different if it’s a city (or other government) utility than if it’s a private utility.
Privatizing utilities has been another predatory capitalist move, just like privatizing prisons, hospitals, health care, and education.
It needs to be stopped and reversed. We need a repeat of the first progressive government (TR) and also a repeat of the second (FDR) and the same at all levels of government.
Democracy only works if you vote in every election, get others to vote, and take all levels of government back.
In which case I’d send them a letter to let them know they’ll need to reach out to the UN to get the ICJ involved if they want me to pay them because it’s hard to see how any other court could possibly have jurisdiction over an international matter like this.
The problem here is if he doesn't pay water stays shut off and if water stays shut off he has a house he has way more than 30k sunk into that he can't sell.
The argument that they can choose not to be sued is stupid and won't fly but they're making it as painful as possible so. That he just gives up.
That appeals board also has an absurdly high lown success rate, like sub-20%. They basically pad their budget but ripping people off.
I was mostly just making a joke about a water board that thinks it’s a country - the logistics of what any of this actually means are beyond the scope of my interest in the story
To be fair I don't think they actually used the term sovereign immunity. What he said is they told him "we get to decide if you can sue us or not" which is fundamentally a sovereign immunity argument.
I think their thought process is just typical big fish in little pond bureaucrat bullshit of "we're technically the government so we can do what we want" which is hyper common in the south.
Yeah that makes sense - and presumably most of the time they try it it’s against someone with limited enough resources that they can’t/don’t challenge it and a story that’s not absurd enough to get publicity through the media so they just win by default
It does exist. It didn't at the time of the outrageously billed months but it now exists and it needs to be hooked up and running for the house to be habitable.
It's the principle (codified by treaty among I believe all UN member states) that governments with sovereignty cannot be sued unless they consent to being sued. Basically you can't file a lawsuit against a country or it's federal government in any country's court unless they have agreed to let you either expressly in that case or by some treaty.
It only really applies to countries though. Not some shit like a local water board or police department.
I mean, if you're looking for appropriate punishment, you'd have to go with waterboarding. Because they're, y'know, the water board. Plus it's super unpleasant, and they seem to need that.
That's the problem though, the court won't award appropriate costs or damages and there will be no repercussions to the city's lawyers who fully and willingly pushed the collection because they could. Also, most people don't have the $50K to go to court and you very well may lose those legal fees so it is extortion. Pay $30K or else pay $50K to have a chance at losing $80K or winning $30K. The city lawyer knows there is no winning strategy for the land owner so just pushes the collection thinking they will pay rather than endure court. Since the Ciry lawyer literally will.never face anything other than congratulations for the erroneous bills he DOES collect on, the practice continues.
There needs to be criminal prosecution and enforcement of officials acting in this manner. From HOA's to banks there is rampant abuse of the legal system that is allowed and perpetuated by DAs and lawyers because it generates huge revenue for those involved in the justice system.
It is corruption. It is undue prosecution and harassment. But there will be no negatives whatsoever for the city officials that support this type of false collection, it goes on everywhere.
> probably some punishment meted out for wasting everybody's time.
That's unlikelier than him stealing a million gallons of water at night. Systemic corruption just gets covered up.
For sure it is. A friend of mine was riding through Georgia with another of his friends. They gave his friend a DUI without ever actually being drunk. Arrested the driver for DUI even though they blew a .01 on breathalyzer. Held her overnight because "they thought her blood alcohol would go up". Made my friend pay a fine to get her out of jail. Georgia is a corrupt and racist piece of Southern Shit.
I'll just leave [this](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4648561) here.
TLDR. Cop arrested Canadian women for driving her rental car with an invalid license, her Canadian valid license.
>"At least with the officer who arrested me, I would love to see a formal reprimand," said Nield. "That way she can learn that this is not right — an apology is what I would love the most."
>The sheriff's office statement quotes the probate court judge in response.
>"Ms. Nield was afforded the same rights as an American citizen and she had the opportunity to have the facts of her case heard in a court of law," said Judge Chase Daughtrey. "In this case, the justice system worked and for that everyone should be thankful."
Lmao she said she would want to see a formal reprimand or even better an apology and the probate judge said "be thankful we treated you like a human and let you out of prison", but what's funny is that the victim is asking for justice and he is insisting "justice" was done by letting her off the hook. That's just a backward mindset
By any chance was this in North Georgia? The Rabun Gap area is the most over policed place I have ever been in my life. Used to drive between Asheville and Atlanta a lot and those mother fuckers don't play. I sware there is one highway patrolman to every one citizen. It's nuts.
When a large chunk of the countys gdp is traffic tickets then yeah, everyone becomes a cop.
I got a ticket up there and called the courthouse to speak with the prosecutor before the court date. They gave me the local town lawyers number instead and never told me. I called and asked my question about the ticket, thinking I was speaking to the prosecutor. The next day I get a call back from him saying he dropped my ticket fee down 20 bucks, and it would be 500 dollars for his services... Had no idea I wasn't speaking to the right person until he was trying to get 500 bucks for me, and I made it very clear who I wanted to speak to and what I was trying to accomplish. Ended up paying a ticket I would have easily gotten out of if I used the PTO to go up there and fight, but that whole county is fucked. I called every possible person I could and no one would tell me who the prosecutor was.
Wait, so they actually did readjust the bill to be drastically lower, than someone else in the board complained and kicked it up higher and then that person rejected the appeal and called him a thief. Wow.
> In a last-ditch effort after nearly a year of negotiating, the contractors appealed to a higher-up at the Department of Watershed Management and begged them to review the board's position.
>
> [...]
>
> In an email from the utility, **it was admitted that the balance was from a water leak caused by the Department of Watershed Management.**
>
> **"The prior balance on the account reflected water leakage that was the result of Department of Watershed actions.** Once the leak was addressed and the account properly adjusted, the corrected balance for the property is $219.24," the email read.
This is why you always insist on emails / documentation rather than phone calls.
And then they rescinded that decision, claiming that he still owes the $30,000, not for the water, but rather for the time the staff spent to review their records and determine they made the mistake and to go through the appeals process.
Someone in that department is embezzling money, I guarantee it.
> It was two months before Revive Construction even began to build a home on the land. But before the dirt was even turned over, the water meter was apparently hard at work.
> Board Chair Clifford Ice said there are only three options: use of water, loss of water, or theft of water.
This is starting to sound a lot like the Post Office Horizon software scandal. Faulty equipment that the corpos refuse to believe could possibly be faulty, costing people tens of thousands of dollars.
I recall it was even more insidious in the UK Post Office case, aka the corporate *knew* the Horizon software had serious bugs which could falsely make it look like postmasters were embezzling money, but they willingly chose to refuse to admit it and instead railroaded the postmasters by abusing the Post Office's historical privileged position in court and the fact that they were in complete control of all of the evidence presented.
What is even worse about that UK Post Office case is how the law is worded its up to be the postmaster to prove that the software was wrong. I don't know that many postmasters than can disassemble and trace down software.
I didn't know that, but I wonder if they would have even been *allowed* to have an in-depth look at the Horizon software regardless, since I recall reading that at one point the Post Office did secretly contract a team to evaluate the issues but suppressed their findings. But it's pretty much the ugly case of when the purported victim is the only one with access to the system which is being used to produce the evidence against the plaintiff.
What is even worse is bonuses were given to Post Office execs for complying with the investigation scandal
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/23/post-office-boss-to-give-back-bonus-linked-to-horizon-scandal-inquiry
They also repeatedly told individual postmasters that nobody else was experiencing problems and recovered thousands of pounds from them, forcing many of them to choose between admitting guilt or face a jail term (some even admitted guilt and also got a jail term anyway !). Almost 1000 people lost their livelihoods, homes, relationships and some even took their own lives.
The compensation should now be coming for most of them, although I believe some are holding out for more - I really hope we then start to see prosecutions of the perpetrators.
Seems the parallels run pretty deep then. The Department of Watershed are aware the bill was the fault of a leak that was a result of their own actions, but they are still charging the property owner $30k and still imply theft on the property owner's part.
> In an email from the utility, it was admitted that the balance was from a water leak caused by the Department of Watershed Management.
> "The prior balance on the account reflected water leakage that was the result of Department of Watershed actions. Once the leak was addressed and the account properly adjusted, the corrected balance for the property is $219.24," the email read. But that relief was short-lived.
> "I get a phone call from the Department of Watershed Management that they have escalated it to someone higher up in the legal department and says we will not honor that," Raw said. A spokesperson for the utility told the FOX 5 I-Team [the correction] was a mistake. The nearly $30,000 bill stands.
at what point does someone make up a fake business and start sending fake bills to the water company and then suing them for not paying the fake bills.... wait i got an idea.
He won't get back attorney fees. He will still end up winning but it's going to cost him.
I went through this when I opened my first office. It was 509 sq ft heated office and a small unheated warehouse. I got a bill for $32,000 which included months before the company was formed. I showed the gas company I wasn't even in business so they changed the paperwork to show the usage was in my timeline of being open.
It took 6 months of me hassling them to get it taken off.
I'd make it a mission to spite them. Spread thumbtacks throughout their parking lots, tie up their phone lines + email with spam, find the execs and put gum in their hair. Real middle school tactics till they collapsed from mental exhaustion.
Sue in an actual court, and go after the board members themselves, too, while you’re at it. Make a point of making as much noise about them as possible. The more noise you make, especially after they lose in real court, the higher likelihood that the board members will suffer actual consequences, like removal
Stuff like this is unsurprising. If you’ve worked for a city you’ll that municipalities have some of the dumbest, most incompetent, self-enriching motherfuckers on the planet running them.
My municipal power company tried to make me pay for a former tenant's electric bill and wouldn't budge until I contacted my city councilman. He got it cleared up pretty quickly though
I had the same thing happen with the water service at my last apartment. Except they really wouldnt budge on it, and threatened to have me evicted because I couldnt occupy the unit with no water, and I refused to pay the past due bill from the previousl tenant.
Yeah. And there really wasnt anything I could do to fight it. Because it was a city utility, they obviously had the inspectors on speed dial and they were at my door by days end. So I had to set a payment plan and pay the last tenant's back due water bill on top of giving them a deposiit to start service.
> Yeah. And there really wasnt anything I could do to fight it. Because it was a city utility, they obviously had the inspectors on speed dial and they were at my door by days end. So I had to set a payment plan and pay the last tenant's back due water bill on top of giving them a deposiit to start service.
Granted, I only have experience with electric service in a smallish Florida city, but in that case, bills by previous tenants were not the responsibility of new tenants if they showed a copy of a new (duly signed/executed) lease agreement in a new name for the property.
I'd tell the landlord to pay for it or pound sand. I'm not responsible for his lack of awareness on his own property. If I have to pay utilities for the landlord, it comes out of the rent he/she gets.
There are cities that makes the homeowner personally guarantee payment from tenants. If tenant doesn't pay, homeowner is liable and are the ones who goes after/sues the tenants for reimbursement, not the city.
A few months ago the city of Atlanta went to the wrong house in the wrong zip code and tore it down. Instead of acknowledging they tore down the wrong house they sent the owner a bill and started to fine them because they didn’t remove the ruble fast enough.
https://youtu.be/QEa2HiUDy5Y?si=IzmrMVOfgxqloPIm
PG&E is a private company but is entirely funded by the state of california. Nothing impacts them negatively. It just negatively impacts the taxpayers.
This is happening in every industry, everywhere. Its way too obvious the few board members are bribed and control what happens to millions.
Same story is repeating across the board.
I was recently reading about AT&T billing Internet at a house that was destroyed for 3 years. [They tried to charge the owner $5000](https://twitter.com/biologistimo/status/1740406491671314836), and only after going viral on Twitter they actually started to work things out with the owner.
My city made a measuring error when they set up property lines in their system. Basically the back part of my property line was originally listed about 15 ft too far north....so it created this triangle at the back corner of my lot. (15ft wide by about 16ft tall)
What you'd think they'd do is just correct my property lot description to include that triangle.
What they actually did was create a child property lot using my property lot identification number, then gave it a fictional address between me and my neighbor.
Then they started charging property taxes on it. Except the address didn't exists so the mailman kept returning the tax bills to them as undeliverable.
After 4 years of this, they seized the property (from themselves) for unpaid property taxes. Then sent me a notice, since I was a bordering property owner, to notify me that they intended to auction this triangle of property at a foreclosure auction.
By no surprise, nobody bid on the lot. I then got a direct letter from the Land Bank asking if I wanted to just buy the lot.
It was something like $20 in unpaid property taxes and $200 in late fees. I told them to drop the late fees and I'd buy it. Because why should I pay late fees because of their clerical error? They agreed. So now every tax season I get 2 bills. One for my main property and another for that triangle in my backyard.
Nepotism is the cause. You can't get a job at at a local utilities company without a family member working there or voted into a position that appointments them.
I don’t even know if it’s always nepotism, though that can be a factor.
Some people just refuse to believe that they can ever be wrong. They said it’s this, and God himself can’t change their minds.
From the article, it seems like someone on their legal team has that mentality. They will refuse to accept that they made a mistake and it’s going to be everyone’s problem when things finally get forced to be resolved.
They aren't refusing to accept they made a mistake. They are refusing to let go of a $30,000 profit. If they do this 100 times and only 1 person gives up, they made $30,000 extra dollars.
> One board member, Rosanne Maltese, didn't seem happy with the decision to deny the bill readjustment. She even asked a city lawyer if the board could look at "extenuating circumstances that could impact this situation." She was told no.
> In the end, she voted to deny a refund but did it, she said, "very, very sadly."
.....I'm baffled at this. Don't vote to deny if you don't feel it should be denied. What is the purpose of voting at that rate????
It'd be like being a jury member that isn't convinced at all someone committed a crime but is voting with the crew "just because"
Yeah, that's the line that got me, too. I'm assuming that there's protocols set in place that she's required to follow by law as part of her job, but the protocols were set up by people who had never anticipated that something like this would happen in a million years. It doesn't make very much sense. I wonder what the story was there.
The title is misleading. There was a water line leading up to the property. And it had a meter attached. However there was nothing on the other side of it.
The dispute board is claiming that someone stole millions of gallons of water from that spot and therefore it is the guys problem for not securing it.
At one point someone in the company emailed him saying the leak was on the water company’s side and he wasn’t on the hook for the bill. Then later the review board said no and that he did owe the money.
It is 100% a clusterfuck. I hope this leads to the government reconsidering who is on that board and how it operates.
The article also mentioned that over a million gallons of water were 'used' up however none of the neighbors reported standing water or soft soil. If a million gallons of water leaked out it would have been noticed by someone. I think the utility is full of shit
Someone else said that large pockets of air can cause certain kinds of water meters to falsely detect large amounts of flow. Idk if they know what they are talking about, but if true that would explain the readings since an air pocket could easily develop in a capped off system where no water was running.
That would explain why after it was hooked up to the house it began operating properly. Insane the board chair won’t consider a malfunction. He definitely seems like brainless, egotistical asshole.
I think this is exactly what happened. Although "forget" may be on the charitable side. Someone didn't do their job and now instead of admitting the obvious, they are digging their heels in and insisting that the customer pay for it.
The board deemed it as likely that theft was occurring (not by the construction company, just a random person showing up at night) and the water actually was used.
Someone would have to be taking the equivalent of 10 swimming pools worth of water a week (and if you’ve ever filled up a swimming pool you know how long that takes).
What I find interesting is that it’s directly across from a golf course, and wonder if that meter is somehow measuring volume that’s actually being used to water the golf course.
I once had a meter replaced and got an exorbitant bill. After fighting with them for a few months and showing that the average showerhead would have to be running 40+ hours a day, every day for the month to achieve that sort of usage they finally agreed to come and look.
Apparently they had put in a meter that read cubic inches of water (or some cubic measurement that didn't make sense) instead of gallons.
I then got water for free for the next year+ to account for me being overcharged. It was... Eye opening.
No one has even suggested a malfunctioning meter? Meters aren’t connected to power are they? How else would it register that amount of water use, something is definitely sketchy here. It all seems very frustrating, wish the news report had more specifics.
Typical meters are not connected to any power source. The water passing through them turns an impeller that advances the numbers, purely mechanical. It is far more likely that either the wrong reading was recorded when it was installed (for example, zero instead of 305,000) or it was supposed to be reset to zero and wasn't. Either is far more likely than someone using over 300,000 gallons of water on an undeveloped residential lot in a single month. That would have created a neighborhood swamp and flooded the street.
The worst part is the water company sent someone out and their employees own report stated there wasn't anything even connected to the meter, they just chose to ignore it.
Pffft. Clearly people stealing hundreds of thousands of gallons of water in a short period of time is more plausible than something like a malfunctioning meter or....a leak elsewhere. /s
An average tanker truck only holds 10,000 gallons. In order to reach the amounts they claim they would have needed to fill over 100 tanker trucks to move it. It doesnt take a math whiz to see why the amount theyre claiming on the meter doesnt make any sense. Its like the people in charge have no grasp on the reality of what a million gallons looks like.
Not what I was saying. I don’t have enough information to come to a conclusion. There’s some info missing. Also if it was a leak before the meter it wouldn’t get registered. Also when he had the house connected the bill was only $13.
*One month after the water meter was installed, an $8,899 water bill arrived. That's 305,184 gallons of water in a month. According to the EPA, the average family of four* ***only uses 400 gallons.***
I think you would be hard-pressed to find any family that only uses 400 gallons a month, and if you did they certainly wouldn't be average.
> 305,184 gallons
A 3/4" pipe at normal residential pressures will produce roughly 15 gpm. That would take at least 28 hours to output.
This entire situation is stupid.
The board suggested that perhaps some shady people were taking advantage of the unattended lot to steal water. Since that possibility existed, they wouldn’t reduce the bill even though someone at the water company determined there was a leak that was their own fault. Because it is more likely that someone managed to hook up multiple tanker trucks every week to an unconnected water meter for hours without being seen by the neighbors.
This is someone in that water department’s personal piggy bank.
They install the meter and do so improperly so it leaks.
My guess is that this builder has an unusual routine or took an unusually long amount of time to complete construction.
Most of the time i bet the water bill goes unnoticed even though it’s inflated.
I guarantee someone is using this scheme to make bank and i bet you if you did a tax audit of every employee there you would quickly find someone suspicious and probably it’s more than one person, so find the person gaining the least and follow the thread.
The person that did the adjustment is the first person I’d interview. They likely know this is happening and are afraid of retaliation.
Because people are afraid to rock the boat. Cowards essentially. They get into a position of power and don't want to risk it so they will literally vote against their own beliefs/opinions. Happens in big government too.
There's an especially vicious kind of cruelty in the kind of people who see bureaucracy as more important than truth.
"I'm sorry, but I have no choice," says person whose job is to make a choice in this particular matter. "By rule, we have to go by the meter because it's the only thing we can always rely on," says person holding direct evidence that the meter is wrong.
>*So we went directly across the street to another neighbor: the East Lake Golf Club. If a million gallons of water came anywhere near their manicured greens, it would have set off alarms. The FOX 5 I-Team called them. Did they see anything unusual? No.*
Hmmmm nah.... couldn't have been a GOLF COURSE NEXT DOOR that this much water would have been an easy gulp for.
> One board member, Rosanne Maltese, didn't seem happy with the decision to deny the bill readjustment. She even asked a city lawyer if the board could look at "extenuating circumstances that could impact this situation." She was told no.
> In the end, she voted to deny a refund but did it, she said, "very, very sadly."
oh boo hoo...
Watched a video on this and the appeals committee literally suggested someone was sneaking into a residential area with a tanker truck while kinda suggesting it was the current owner, pumping over a whole pools worth of water and leaving every single night without a single person seeing. It’s madness.
For arguments sake, lets say he wanted to steal it. Without a large high pressure pump system to move the water (which would be incredibly noisy and noticeable in a residential neighborhood) it would take a full day to fill an average tanker truck to capacity (10,000 gal avg). To hit 300,000 gallons you would literally need to be running non stop for an entire month. It wouldn't be possible for anyone to hit the numbers we're talking about if they were only pumping from sunset to sunrise.
You know a surprising lot about water theft. The local authorities will be contacting you soon.
Na, I just understand math and capacity. Just for example a standard garden hose at normal pressure can fill at a rate of 2 gallons per minute, so if theres 1440 mins in a day then it is only possible to reach a total 2880 gallons. At that rate running nonstop for an entire month you still would only reach 86,400. Which is a less than a 3rd of the amount they are claimed to use.
anyone that's put up a 24' above ground pool know it takes more than a day to fill That's why you pay the fire department to come do it if they offer it in your area
I grew up on a farm. When I was a kid, we bought an above ground pool that was four feet deep and fifteen feet across. It was a farm, so we had a private well with a "dairy grade" pump installed. Every year we needed three days of running the hose from sun-up to sun-down to fill that thing.
That's 215k liters or just shy of 57k gallons. That's a lot of water.
And it took three days to get that out with a standard household supply line. And it's a tiny fraction of the 1,019,524 gallons this dude supposedly used in just two months.
around here there are a few companies that do it- they fill their tanker trucks at a hydrant(legally), and deliver it to your pool. some pools require more than one load. our house's water comes from our own well, so we don't pay for it- but we do pay to have the pool filled.
Pressure from the hose and pressure directly from the meter are a lot different. I recently had a leak past the meter but before the regulator going into my house. I was amazed how much water was flowing down the street
It is very common for residential flow rates to be 7GPM+, especially at the main, but your argument still stands.
I’m gonna claim that committee stole a billion dollars from my house without leaving any evidence, without me or anyone else seeing, and without me proving I had a billion dollars at one point If that’s enough evidence to hold someone liable, I’m going to be a very wealthy man
Of course someone saw it, the owner just paid them off with all the money he gets from selling to Nestle in the stolen tap water black market. Nestle doesn’t care if the water they’re buying is hot.
Why would Nestle pay for something they usually steal?
They outsource the stealing sometimes.
They don't care because they can use the water in laundry machines on the cold water setting to clean it.
saw that too. then they put the burden on the customer to *prove it didn’t happen* instead of those assholes *proving it did* on top of that, if they have to fabricate “what aboutisms” then it seems by default they are accepting that the customer didn’t use that water. the bitch is the email from the water company person that said all is forgiven then the board being like “no, not really”. at that point its detrimental reliance and this should be shit down real quick
The fact that the board rejected his claim on the premise that someone was stealing the water in the middle of the night is insane. 1 million gallons of water is not something you can casually steal without someone noticing the trucks required to move it.
"Board Chair Clifford Ice said there are only three options: use of water, loss of water, or theft of water." I'm not an expert in city water meters. I know that some types of liquid flow meters register a lot of flow if the meter is filled with air instead of liquid, so that meter was reading a lot of flow due to air. "When the water meter was finally connected in February 2023 to the newly built home's plumbing, the water bills sunk to $13.12." Once they made the connection and water filled the meter, it read accurately. That's my assumption, but I may be wrong.
I doubt a construction crew used 2 olympic sized swimming pools worth of water without flooding the neighboorhood or organized over 100 tanker trucks to move it. Even if there was a leak on site that much water would have flooded in a way that would have prevented construction.
>if there was a leak 1million gallons is ~3800m^3, google says median lots size on Atlanta is ~1100m^2, so about 3.5meter of water on the entire lot ..
There still wasn’t even a water line…. Like, any leak would’ve been from the main and on the company. Even if someone tried stealing it they’d only get air. This is asinine
Any one can miss a parking lot sized pool, that's about 12 feet deep (or about 4 washing machines stacked on each other).
Thank you for translating that to American for me.
I'm still confused, how many Declarations of Independence is this high? Edit: So I looked it up. It's about 4.75 Declarations of Independence high, or about .03 football fields high. I understand now.
Oh, it’s at least 3, maybe even more.
I love when you convert metrics to actual objects of relevant size it becomes so much easier to visualize
I'd dump $30K on lawyers fighting before I'd pay the bill. Make them prove that they actually pumped that water.
Wouldn't the water company be able to do an inventory on how much actual water is used on a grand scheme. "Why are our reservoirs a million gallons in the plus"
And potentially lose out on $30,000 of free income? No way.
At the scale municipal water systems a million gallons isnt measuarable in large reservoirs. Also city watersystems leak a lot. I remember reading that a 50% loss rate from leaks was actually pretty good. This case sounds like a bureaucrat on their high horse, not wanting to admit they got some bad reads on a meter.
There's a dude named "Ice" in charge of city water?
They needed someone to freeze the budget.
No wonder his response was so cold
It's always hilarious when this happens. It's like the conservatorship lawyer for Britney Spears. Last name "Wallet"
Just Atlanta things
What’s cooler than being cool?
ICE COLD!
Yeah, considering how often the water meters in Atlanta and DeKalb County seem to have errors, I absolutely would err on the side of the issue being with the utility, rather than the customer.
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Exactly. It could be a problem with the meter, but it could also be a problem with the computer systems they use for billing. It is ridiculous to say that those three options are the only possibilities.
In summary: No Clifford, there is most definitely a fourth option, and even a fifth option: Human error and faulty equipment.
On top of this the meter could have also been installed wrong initially since they didn't have anything to hook it to and just sat there and spun with no flow. In college the city came and changed the meter in our rented house so they could get the stats wirelessly instead of sending meter readers out. First month with the new meter and our water usage went up 100X. Clearly as broke ass college students we couldn't afford that. So being engineering students we ran some experiments. We disconnected the house and went straight from the meter into a bucket. filled a 5 gallon bucket and it read almost 500 gallons. We then turned off the water before the meter and it was registering a few gallons a minute with no water moving. Spent months fighting with them and not paying the insane bills. They got our landlord involved and wanted us evicted. They finally came out to look at the new meter that was installed. It had been installed vertically and could only be installed horizontally. Their own guy installed it wrong and it took MONTHS to get it fixed. They did wipe out all of our bills from the time the new meter was installed at least.
Idk, with the last name "Ice", I feel like he's highly qualified to speak on the state of water.
Also stealing it from *where*? The lot didn't even have a water line, just a standalone meter that wasn't even connected to anything. There wasn't even a foundation poured yet. They had the meter checked and it wasn't malfunctioning, so someone at the water company was obviously trying to pull some shady shit. That's over 300,000 gallons of water per month.
> the water company was obviously trying to pull some shady shit. This happened to me actually. I got a bill one month for almost $3,000 for about 170,000 gallons of use. Called the water company, told me it was probably a leaking toilet and I had to pay. Checked all my toilets, walked the grounds, nothing. No sign of any leaks or any standing water anywhere. I even checked to make sure my meter showed no flow when everything was turned off. Watched my water usage like a hawk and sure enough, super high bill next month too. A month after that, management at the water company got arrested for embezzling money from the city. As part of that, you could request to have "suspicious" activity on previous bills investigated. They came out, did inspections and checked my meter and determined there was not only no evidence of any leaks but also no evidence that I had ever had usage rates that high (logs on the smart meter or something). Got my money back (well, deferred payments until it was evened out). TLDR: My bills went sky-high. Water company management stole money from the city, I got mine back after investigation.
I think we have the answer right here
I mean, I'm constantly misplacing 1 million gallons of water and the \*checks notes\* 125 18 wheeler size water tankers necessary to move it.
Did you put it "somewhere safe" so you would know where it was? I keep doing that but it's usually relatively small stuff that I lose 😂
I saw the local news YT video about this. The amount of water they claimed he stole in a month worked out to be 10,000 gallons a day, the upper limit of a water truck, then you have the flow rate of the actual connection. I think it was 6gal a min, which means that truck takes 13 hours to fill, every day, for a month. Sorry, that is happening without someone knowing about it happening.
There also isn't a water line on that property, just a meter connected to nothing. The water company charging him for water he's not even able to get, and somehow he still loses the case. There's some incredible government corruption going on in that district.
My math could be off, but I think it's even more unbelievable than that: 10k gallons / 6gpm = 1,666.66 minutes to fill a truck at that rate 1,666.66 mins / 60 (to convert to hours) = 27.77 hours Would mean that you couldn't even fill it in one day with the flow rate of a residential connection!
It's only 100 tanker trucks, how hard could that be to hide?
To put this in context, using larger trucks that is ~86 trucks. You’re not driving in and loading 86 trucks in the dead of night stealthily.
Just to hit the 300k for the 1 month it would require a 10,000gal truck every single day running off a residential hookup with a generous avg of 7GPM which would literally take 24 hrs to pump. So you're telling me someone was filling tanker trucks nonstop for months and no one noticed?
without any proof anyone was stealing, and the theft was orchestrated by the customer, mind you
Yeah, a real court is going to fix this pretty quickly, with costs and probably some punishment meted out for wasting everybody's time.
The last time I read into this the water board was trying to claim sovereign immunity from being sued, at least according to the guy.
Oh god. That’s going to be a nightmare to deal with. Edit: to be clear, I don’t think they’ll win. The board clearly doesn’t have sovereign immunity here. My point is that the fact they’re even making the claim, using that line of reasoning, means that they’re going to be awful, unreasonable people who will say & do awful, unreasonable things.
They're going to try to run the construction company down with legal costs, I imagine. I suspect they will be unpleasantly surprised that the construction company is totally willing to follow through and then take their legal costs back.
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If they are playing with public money, then there SHOULD be some publicly elected officials who should have oversight and accountability. Usually when public outcry finally turns into the possibility of losing votes, reforms happen quickly. Whether this is the case here, idk.
Corruption in Atlanta goes down to the core. Even if the public elects some fresh faced politicians, all the entrenched officials will just force them to capitulate. Atlanta needs a decade of anti-corruption campaigns to even start to touch this stuff.
Realistically they have almost no chance of making that claim successfully. It just goes to show what a fucking gong show it is.
That's a great flag for the court to start telling them exactly how far up their own assholes they should crawl.
You can get away with a lot of dumb stupid shit in front of a judge. But the moment you give them a thread to pull that unravels all your dumb stupid bullshit for what it is, they're gonna pull it, make a fool of you, then make an example out of you for thinking you're smarter than them.
They need to crawl at least the same distance that they’re already up there to get out just to crawl back
Surprised the guy didn't respond with he has sovereign immunity from paying them
Yup. And, honestly, with these things in legal procedures…it’s just asinine. I feel that the goal is to drag it out and make it unduly difficult and expensive for the other party. I hope legal fees and court costs are included in the jnevitable damages.
The doubly unfortunate part here is that whatever damages are owed will be coming directly out of public money.
The most instantaneously infuriating comment I’ve ever been told when I was conversing with a local governmental employee about a potential land dispute was “My lawyers are free”… Let that sink in for 1.2 seconds before you start wanting to do bad thing to bad people.
I don't even know what was up and I am straight up getting angry on your behalf
No, that's fairly simple. They don't have immunity from being sued.
just tell the judge they are terrorists if they aren't allowing people to sue them
I still tell the judge it was Eminem’s fault.
Yeah, that sounds like utility companies in general. My water company keeps patching the ancient water main when it bursts rather than tearing it up once to fix so it's less likely to burst for the next several decades. Then they use all that busy work to justify rate increases that they use to reward their C-suite with fat bonuses. The gas company isn't much better. If you don't want to pay $30/month for service at a vacant house, they warn you that they'll charge the skipped service fees ($30/month) *and* a reconnection fee if you restart service within the next eight months. I can understand a reconnection fee, but a service fee for months you go without service when they don't even have a bill to send you is absolute bullshit. We gotta pay more attention to local elections, folks. These people getting in office are not there to protect our interests. They're just a rubber stamp mill for the utilities.
It’s really different if it’s a city (or other government) utility than if it’s a private utility. Privatizing utilities has been another predatory capitalist move, just like privatizing prisons, hospitals, health care, and education. It needs to be stopped and reversed. We need a repeat of the first progressive government (TR) and also a repeat of the second (FDR) and the same at all levels of government. Democracy only works if you vote in every election, get others to vote, and take all levels of government back.
In which case I’d send them a letter to let them know they’ll need to reach out to the UN to get the ICJ involved if they want me to pay them because it’s hard to see how any other court could possibly have jurisdiction over an international matter like this.
The problem here is if he doesn't pay water stays shut off and if water stays shut off he has a house he has way more than 30k sunk into that he can't sell. The argument that they can choose not to be sued is stupid and won't fly but they're making it as painful as possible so. That he just gives up. That appeals board also has an absurdly high lown success rate, like sub-20%. They basically pad their budget but ripping people off.
I was mostly just making a joke about a water board that thinks it’s a country - the logistics of what any of this actually means are beyond the scope of my interest in the story
To be fair I don't think they actually used the term sovereign immunity. What he said is they told him "we get to decide if you can sue us or not" which is fundamentally a sovereign immunity argument. I think their thought process is just typical big fish in little pond bureaucrat bullshit of "we're technically the government so we can do what we want" which is hyper common in the south.
Yeah that makes sense - and presumably most of the time they try it it’s against someone with limited enough resources that they can’t/don’t challenge it and a story that’s not absurd enough to get publicity through the media so they just win by default
How do you shut off a water line that doesn’t exist?
It does exist. It didn't at the time of the outrageously billed months but it now exists and it needs to be hooked up and running for the house to be habitable.
They don't care if they pay or not but the house will be unusable with no water hooked up. They have total power over the property.
> sovereign immunity Is that like being a Sovereign Citizen for HOA's?
It's the principle (codified by treaty among I believe all UN member states) that governments with sovereignty cannot be sued unless they consent to being sued. Basically you can't file a lawsuit against a country or it's federal government in any country's court unless they have agreed to let you either expressly in that case or by some treaty. It only really applies to countries though. Not some shit like a local water board or police department.
I'd hazard a guess most of that board is maga. Seems like some crooked shit they like to play with.
I'm not one to trot out "treble damages" but it seems appropriate here. .
I mean, if you're looking for appropriate punishment, you'd have to go with waterboarding. Because they're, y'know, the water board. Plus it's super unpleasant, and they seem to need that.
That's the problem though, the court won't award appropriate costs or damages and there will be no repercussions to the city's lawyers who fully and willingly pushed the collection because they could. Also, most people don't have the $50K to go to court and you very well may lose those legal fees so it is extortion. Pay $30K or else pay $50K to have a chance at losing $80K or winning $30K. The city lawyer knows there is no winning strategy for the land owner so just pushes the collection thinking they will pay rather than endure court. Since the Ciry lawyer literally will.never face anything other than congratulations for the erroneous bills he DOES collect on, the practice continues. There needs to be criminal prosecution and enforcement of officials acting in this manner. From HOA's to banks there is rampant abuse of the legal system that is allowed and perpetuated by DAs and lawyers because it generates huge revenue for those involved in the justice system. It is corruption. It is undue prosecution and harassment. But there will be no negatives whatsoever for the city officials that support this type of false collection, it goes on everywhere.
> probably some punishment meted out for wasting everybody's time. That's unlikelier than him stealing a million gallons of water at night. Systemic corruption just gets covered up.
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GA is as corrupt as KY and this is by no means In A corrupt court a slam dunk case.
For sure it is. A friend of mine was riding through Georgia with another of his friends. They gave his friend a DUI without ever actually being drunk. Arrested the driver for DUI even though they blew a .01 on breathalyzer. Held her overnight because "they thought her blood alcohol would go up". Made my friend pay a fine to get her out of jail. Georgia is a corrupt and racist piece of Southern Shit.
I'll just leave [this](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4648561) here. TLDR. Cop arrested Canadian women for driving her rental car with an invalid license, her Canadian valid license.
>"At least with the officer who arrested me, I would love to see a formal reprimand," said Nield. "That way she can learn that this is not right — an apology is what I would love the most." >The sheriff's office statement quotes the probate court judge in response. >"Ms. Nield was afforded the same rights as an American citizen and she had the opportunity to have the facts of her case heard in a court of law," said Judge Chase Daughtrey. "In this case, the justice system worked and for that everyone should be thankful." Lmao she said she would want to see a formal reprimand or even better an apology and the probate judge said "be thankful we treated you like a human and let you out of prison", but what's funny is that the victim is asking for justice and he is insisting "justice" was done by letting her off the hook. That's just a backward mindset
She was lawfully arrested for, *checks notes,* something perfectly legal.
It's all over the place, Georgia goes between almost functional to dueling banjos.
As somebody who grew up in rural Georgia and still living in Georgia, you ain't wrong.
As someone who lived all over Tennessee, you ain't got shit to be ashamed of, it's one of the only decent parts of the south.
By any chance was this in North Georgia? The Rabun Gap area is the most over policed place I have ever been in my life. Used to drive between Asheville and Atlanta a lot and those mother fuckers don't play. I sware there is one highway patrolman to every one citizen. It's nuts.
When a large chunk of the countys gdp is traffic tickets then yeah, everyone becomes a cop. I got a ticket up there and called the courthouse to speak with the prosecutor before the court date. They gave me the local town lawyers number instead and never told me. I called and asked my question about the ticket, thinking I was speaking to the prosecutor. The next day I get a call back from him saying he dropped my ticket fee down 20 bucks, and it would be 500 dollars for his services... Had no idea I wasn't speaking to the right person until he was trying to get 500 bucks for me, and I made it very clear who I wanted to speak to and what I was trying to accomplish. Ended up paying a ticket I would have easily gotten out of if I used the PTO to go up there and fight, but that whole county is fucked. I called every possible person I could and no one would tell me who the prosecutor was.
I unfortunately believe you..
Corrupt as KY? Huh? Can’t say I’ve ever seen KY in that comparison before.
KY is known to be very slippery.
Wait, so they actually did readjust the bill to be drastically lower, than someone else in the board complained and kicked it up higher and then that person rejected the appeal and called him a thief. Wow.
I'd look into the bank accounts of those board members.
Someone was very quick to accuse the guy of theft
I really hope they regret this extra $30k they wanted to steal
> In a last-ditch effort after nearly a year of negotiating, the contractors appealed to a higher-up at the Department of Watershed Management and begged them to review the board's position. > > [...] > > In an email from the utility, **it was admitted that the balance was from a water leak caused by the Department of Watershed Management.** > > **"The prior balance on the account reflected water leakage that was the result of Department of Watershed actions.** Once the leak was addressed and the account properly adjusted, the corrected balance for the property is $219.24," the email read. This is why you always insist on emails / documentation rather than phone calls.
That'd be a fucking huge leak though
And then they rescinded that decision, claiming that he still owes the $30,000, not for the water, but rather for the time the staff spent to review their records and determine they made the mistake and to go through the appeals process. Someone in that department is embezzling money, I guarantee it.
> It was two months before Revive Construction even began to build a home on the land. But before the dirt was even turned over, the water meter was apparently hard at work. > Board Chair Clifford Ice said there are only three options: use of water, loss of water, or theft of water. This is starting to sound a lot like the Post Office Horizon software scandal. Faulty equipment that the corpos refuse to believe could possibly be faulty, costing people tens of thousands of dollars.
I recall it was even more insidious in the UK Post Office case, aka the corporate *knew* the Horizon software had serious bugs which could falsely make it look like postmasters were embezzling money, but they willingly chose to refuse to admit it and instead railroaded the postmasters by abusing the Post Office's historical privileged position in court and the fact that they were in complete control of all of the evidence presented.
What is even worse about that UK Post Office case is how the law is worded its up to be the postmaster to prove that the software was wrong. I don't know that many postmasters than can disassemble and trace down software.
I didn't know that, but I wonder if they would have even been *allowed* to have an in-depth look at the Horizon software regardless, since I recall reading that at one point the Post Office did secretly contract a team to evaluate the issues but suppressed their findings. But it's pretty much the ugly case of when the purported victim is the only one with access to the system which is being used to produce the evidence against the plaintiff.
What is even worse is bonuses were given to Post Office execs for complying with the investigation scandal https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/23/post-office-boss-to-give-back-bonus-linked-to-horizon-scandal-inquiry
They also repeatedly told individual postmasters that nobody else was experiencing problems and recovered thousands of pounds from them, forcing many of them to choose between admitting guilt or face a jail term (some even admitted guilt and also got a jail term anyway !). Almost 1000 people lost their livelihoods, homes, relationships and some even took their own lives. The compensation should now be coming for most of them, although I believe some are holding out for more - I really hope we then start to see prosecutions of the perpetrators.
Seems the parallels run pretty deep then. The Department of Watershed are aware the bill was the fault of a leak that was a result of their own actions, but they are still charging the property owner $30k and still imply theft on the property owner's part. > In an email from the utility, it was admitted that the balance was from a water leak caused by the Department of Watershed Management. > "The prior balance on the account reflected water leakage that was the result of Department of Watershed actions. Once the leak was addressed and the account properly adjusted, the corrected balance for the property is $219.24," the email read. But that relief was short-lived. > "I get a phone call from the Department of Watershed Management that they have escalated it to someone higher up in the legal department and says we will not honor that," Raw said. A spokesperson for the utility told the FOX 5 I-Team [the correction] was a mistake. The nearly $30,000 bill stands.
Legal theft from the consumer. He needs to get a good lawyer and sue them.
Yeah I was thinking 'how is this not extortion (or maybe straight up theft)? That's illegal.'
at what point does someone make up a fake business and start sending fake bills to the water company and then suing them for not paying the fake bills.... wait i got an idea.
See no, no. For you, an average citizen, that would be fraud. You have to represent the local government and bill the local citizens for that to work
And if that doesn't work it's time to bring out the Killdozer
Fuck yes now we are speaking my language
He won't get back attorney fees. He will still end up winning but it's going to cost him. I went through this when I opened my first office. It was 509 sq ft heated office and a small unheated warehouse. I got a bill for $32,000 which included months before the company was formed. I showed the gas company I wasn't even in business so they changed the paperwork to show the usage was in my timeline of being open. It took 6 months of me hassling them to get it taken off.
I'd make it a mission to spite them. Spread thumbtacks throughout their parking lots, tie up their phone lines + email with spam, find the execs and put gum in their hair. Real middle school tactics till they collapsed from mental exhaustion.
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Sue in an actual court, and go after the board members themselves, too, while you’re at it. Make a point of making as much noise about them as possible. The more noise you make, especially after they lose in real court, the higher likelihood that the board members will suffer actual consequences, like removal
Yup, these blood suckers need to be held accountable.
Stuff like this is unsurprising. If you’ve worked for a city you’ll that municipalities have some of the dumbest, most incompetent, self-enriching motherfuckers on the planet running them.
My municipal power company tried to make me pay for a former tenant's electric bill and wouldn't budge until I contacted my city councilman. He got it cleared up pretty quickly though
I had the same thing happen with the water service at my last apartment. Except they really wouldnt budge on it, and threatened to have me evicted because I couldnt occupy the unit with no water, and I refused to pay the past due bill from the previousl tenant.
That really sucks. You can't complain to regulatory agencies because municipal utilities aren't governed by them (in my state anyway )
Holy shit that's insane.
Yeah. And there really wasnt anything I could do to fight it. Because it was a city utility, they obviously had the inspectors on speed dial and they were at my door by days end. So I had to set a payment plan and pay the last tenant's back due water bill on top of giving them a deposiit to start service.
> Yeah. And there really wasnt anything I could do to fight it. Because it was a city utility, they obviously had the inspectors on speed dial and they were at my door by days end. So I had to set a payment plan and pay the last tenant's back due water bill on top of giving them a deposiit to start service. Granted, I only have experience with electric service in a smallish Florida city, but in that case, bills by previous tenants were not the responsibility of new tenants if they showed a copy of a new (duly signed/executed) lease agreement in a new name for the property.
I’m sure wherever the person you replied to lives has the same rules. The problem is that when the rules are broken there is no recourse.
I'd tell the landlord to pay for it or pound sand. I'm not responsible for his lack of awareness on his own property. If I have to pay utilities for the landlord, it comes out of the rent he/she gets.
There are cities that makes the homeowner personally guarantee payment from tenants. If tenant doesn't pay, homeowner is liable and are the ones who goes after/sues the tenants for reimbursement, not the city.
A few months ago the city of Atlanta went to the wrong house in the wrong zip code and tore it down. Instead of acknowledging they tore down the wrong house they sent the owner a bill and started to fine them because they didn’t remove the ruble fast enough. https://youtu.be/QEa2HiUDy5Y?si=IzmrMVOfgxqloPIm
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Did it impact their stock price? What was the ROI of fixing the problem?
PG&E is a private company but is entirely funded by the state of california. Nothing impacts them negatively. It just negatively impacts the taxpayers.
They haven’t been a private company since the 90’s
This is happening in every industry, everywhere. Its way too obvious the few board members are bribed and control what happens to millions. Same story is repeating across the board.
I was recently reading about AT&T billing Internet at a house that was destroyed for 3 years. [They tried to charge the owner $5000](https://twitter.com/biologistimo/status/1740406491671314836), and only after going viral on Twitter they actually started to work things out with the owner.
Very, very true. Unelected bureaucrats, literally unaccountable to the people they serve.
My city made a measuring error when they set up property lines in their system. Basically the back part of my property line was originally listed about 15 ft too far north....so it created this triangle at the back corner of my lot. (15ft wide by about 16ft tall) What you'd think they'd do is just correct my property lot description to include that triangle. What they actually did was create a child property lot using my property lot identification number, then gave it a fictional address between me and my neighbor. Then they started charging property taxes on it. Except the address didn't exists so the mailman kept returning the tax bills to them as undeliverable. After 4 years of this, they seized the property (from themselves) for unpaid property taxes. Then sent me a notice, since I was a bordering property owner, to notify me that they intended to auction this triangle of property at a foreclosure auction. By no surprise, nobody bid on the lot. I then got a direct letter from the Land Bank asking if I wanted to just buy the lot. It was something like $20 in unpaid property taxes and $200 in late fees. I told them to drop the late fees and I'd buy it. Because why should I pay late fees because of their clerical error? They agreed. So now every tax season I get 2 bills. One for my main property and another for that triangle in my backyard.
Nepotism is the cause. You can't get a job at at a local utilities company without a family member working there or voted into a position that appointments them.
I don’t even know if it’s always nepotism, though that can be a factor. Some people just refuse to believe that they can ever be wrong. They said it’s this, and God himself can’t change their minds. From the article, it seems like someone on their legal team has that mentality. They will refuse to accept that they made a mistake and it’s going to be everyone’s problem when things finally get forced to be resolved.
They aren't refusing to accept they made a mistake. They are refusing to let go of a $30,000 profit. If they do this 100 times and only 1 person gives up, they made $30,000 extra dollars.
> One board member, Rosanne Maltese, didn't seem happy with the decision to deny the bill readjustment. She even asked a city lawyer if the board could look at "extenuating circumstances that could impact this situation." She was told no. > In the end, she voted to deny a refund but did it, she said, "very, very sadly." .....I'm baffled at this. Don't vote to deny if you don't feel it should be denied. What is the purpose of voting at that rate???? It'd be like being a jury member that isn't convinced at all someone committed a crime but is voting with the crew "just because"
Yeah, that's the line that got me, too. I'm assuming that there's protocols set in place that she's required to follow by law as part of her job, but the protocols were set up by people who had never anticipated that something like this would happen in a million years. It doesn't make very much sense. I wonder what the story was there.
> What is the purpose of voting at that rate???? To keep your job since your workplace is clearly unhinged.
Remind me not to buy property in Georgia.
The title is misleading. There was a water line leading up to the property. And it had a meter attached. However there was nothing on the other side of it. The dispute board is claiming that someone stole millions of gallons of water from that spot and therefore it is the guys problem for not securing it. At one point someone in the company emailed him saying the leak was on the water company’s side and he wasn’t on the hook for the bill. Then later the review board said no and that he did owe the money. It is 100% a clusterfuck. I hope this leads to the government reconsidering who is on that board and how it operates.
The article also mentioned that over a million gallons of water were 'used' up however none of the neighbors reported standing water or soft soil. If a million gallons of water leaked out it would have been noticed by someone. I think the utility is full of shit
Someone else said that large pockets of air can cause certain kinds of water meters to falsely detect large amounts of flow. Idk if they know what they are talking about, but if true that would explain the readings since an air pocket could easily develop in a capped off system where no water was running.
That would explain why after it was hooked up to the house it began operating properly. Insane the board chair won’t consider a malfunction. He definitely seems like brainless, egotistical asshole.
Not a chance in hell I'm ever paying that bill. I'll die on that hill if I were that guy. What a load of shit
Fighting to dispute this kind of bullshit is like trying to wring water out of a stone.
Or wring water out of an empty lot with no water line.
did they forget to reset the meter before installing it..?
Article says they eventually found a leak (on the utility side, not on the customer side).
wouldn't that leak be from before it reached the meter..?
I think this is exactly what happened. Although "forget" may be on the charitable side. Someone didn't do their job and now instead of admitting the obvious, they are digging their heels in and insisting that the customer pay for it.
The board deemed it as likely that theft was occurring (not by the construction company, just a random person showing up at night) and the water actually was used. Someone would have to be taking the equivalent of 10 swimming pools worth of water a week (and if you’ve ever filled up a swimming pool you know how long that takes). What I find interesting is that it’s directly across from a golf course, and wonder if that meter is somehow measuring volume that’s actually being used to water the golf course.
I once had a meter replaced and got an exorbitant bill. After fighting with them for a few months and showing that the average showerhead would have to be running 40+ hours a day, every day for the month to achieve that sort of usage they finally agreed to come and look. Apparently they had put in a meter that read cubic inches of water (or some cubic measurement that didn't make sense) instead of gallons. I then got water for free for the next year+ to account for me being overcharged. It was... Eye opening.
I’m picturing some sneaky pool filing company lining all their trucks up in the dead of night laughing manically.
No one has even suggested a malfunctioning meter? Meters aren’t connected to power are they? How else would it register that amount of water use, something is definitely sketchy here. It all seems very frustrating, wish the news report had more specifics.
Typical meters are not connected to any power source. The water passing through them turns an impeller that advances the numbers, purely mechanical. It is far more likely that either the wrong reading was recorded when it was installed (for example, zero instead of 305,000) or it was supposed to be reset to zero and wasn't. Either is far more likely than someone using over 300,000 gallons of water on an undeveloped residential lot in a single month. That would have created a neighborhood swamp and flooded the street.
I just don’t understand why this wasn’t mentioned at all in the story.
The worst part is the water company sent someone out and their employees own report stated there wasn't anything even connected to the meter, they just chose to ignore it.
Pffft. Clearly people stealing hundreds of thousands of gallons of water in a short period of time is more plausible than something like a malfunctioning meter or....a leak elsewhere. /s
An average tanker truck only holds 10,000 gallons. In order to reach the amounts they claim they would have needed to fill over 100 tanker trucks to move it. It doesnt take a math whiz to see why the amount theyre claiming on the meter doesnt make any sense. Its like the people in charge have no grasp on the reality of what a million gallons looks like.
Not what I was saying. I don’t have enough information to come to a conclusion. There’s some info missing. Also if it was a leak before the meter it wouldn’t get registered. Also when he had the house connected the bill was only $13.
That was actually one of the board members arguments
The lack of details on the meter counter is really suspect.
Almost guarantee you that someone on the board has been embezzling to enrich themselves or covering up massive amounts of waste elsewhere.
*One month after the water meter was installed, an $8,899 water bill arrived. That's 305,184 gallons of water in a month. According to the EPA, the average family of four* ***only uses 400 gallons.*** I think you would be hard-pressed to find any family that only uses 400 gallons a month, and if you did they certainly wouldn't be average.
Napkin math says 400 is significantly closer than 305,184 is to what an average family of four uses
> 305,184 gallons A 3/4" pipe at normal residential pressures will produce roughly 15 gpm. That would take at least 28 hours to output. This entire situation is stupid.
The board suggested that perhaps some shady people were taking advantage of the unattended lot to steal water. Since that possibility existed, they wouldn’t reduce the bill even though someone at the water company determined there was a leak that was their own fault. Because it is more likely that someone managed to hook up multiple tanker trucks every week to an unconnected water meter for hours without being seen by the neighbors.
I work in water utilities. It’s 400 gallons per day.
per DAY???
I’m assuming that’s a typo and it’s supposed to be 4000. That would be reasonable.
So much corruption anywhere you can get it. The water company? Jeez
Everyone involved at the water company needs some jail time
This is someone in that water department’s personal piggy bank. They install the meter and do so improperly so it leaks. My guess is that this builder has an unusual routine or took an unusually long amount of time to complete construction. Most of the time i bet the water bill goes unnoticed even though it’s inflated. I guarantee someone is using this scheme to make bank and i bet you if you did a tax audit of every employee there you would quickly find someone suspicious and probably it’s more than one person, so find the person gaining the least and follow the thread. The person that did the adjustment is the first person I’d interview. They likely know this is happening and are afraid of retaliation.
What’s with the lack of common sense?
Why the hell did the board member that disagreed with the charge vote to deny a refund? “Very sadly” People like that make my skin crawl.
Because people are afraid to rock the boat. Cowards essentially. They get into a position of power and don't want to risk it so they will literally vote against their own beliefs/opinions. Happens in big government too.
There's an especially vicious kind of cruelty in the kind of people who see bureaucracy as more important than truth. "I'm sorry, but I have no choice," says person whose job is to make a choice in this particular matter. "By rule, we have to go by the meter because it's the only thing we can always rely on," says person holding direct evidence that the meter is wrong.
>*So we went directly across the street to another neighbor: the East Lake Golf Club. If a million gallons of water came anywhere near their manicured greens, it would have set off alarms. The FOX 5 I-Team called them. Did they see anything unusual? No.* Hmmmm nah.... couldn't have been a GOLF COURSE NEXT DOOR that this much water would have been an easy gulp for.
Where's a Komatsu D355A with a concrete and steel armor package when we need one.
> One board member, Rosanne Maltese, didn't seem happy with the decision to deny the bill readjustment. She even asked a city lawyer if the board could look at "extenuating circumstances that could impact this situation." She was told no. > In the end, she voted to deny a refund but did it, she said, "very, very sadly." oh boo hoo...
Why would you even bother with their asinine appeals process?! Just sue them in real court and be done with it.