Jimmy Reynolds was accustomed to paying around $60 a month for Wartrace water service until a year ago when the city finished installing new digital water meters. After the meter installation project, Reynolds water bills dropped to around $25. Jimmy said he assumed the drop in his bill was the result of the water system improvements...
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Jimmy Reynolds was accustomed to paying around $60 a month for Wartrace water service until a year ago when the city finished installing new digital water meters.
After the meter installation project, Reynolds water bills dropped to around $25. Jimmy said he assumed the drop in his bill was the result of the water system improvements.
“I knew the city of Wartrace was awarded money to do something to the water system,” Reynolds said. “So I thought ‘Well now that they put in this new water system my water bill has gone down. It stayed that way for seven months.”
However, that all changed when he got his November water bill for $62.81.
Jimmy went to city hall to find out what happened and he was told that the city had discovered that his meter was not reading correctly and had to be reprogrammed. He was also told that he should feel lucky that for nearly a year he had been undercharged, saving him hundreds of dollars.
Reynolds doesn’t mind too much that his bill jumped back up to what it was before, what irritates him is that nobody from the city bothered to notify him that it was about to happen and offer an explanation as to why.
“The main thing was, I received no notice. At least they should have sent me something to say there was a problem,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds lives with his sister, who compared their water bill situation to her experience working in payroll. “If somebody’s paycheck went up they didn’t say nothin’ about it, but if it went down they would.”
The basic water fee, with usage under 500 gallons, is around $20. So, when Reynolds’ sister would go to the town office to pay in person and the bill was so low, why, he wonders, didn’t they say anything about her abnormally low bill.
“My question to them (at city hall) was why, when my sister came in to pay the bill, paying $25 when normally she’d been paying $60, didn’t that alert them?”
“The lady told me, ‘With 1,200 customers it’s hard to know what’s going on.’”
Reynolds is not satisfied with the way the town treated him. “Notice,” he said. “That would have been the right way to do something.”
A Wartrace town official sent an email Tuesday morning after speaking about Reynolds’ issue: “By law we can go back 36 months and collect from customers whose meters were not functioning correctly. [Tennessee Code Annotated, § 28-3-302.]”
