Austin Water Woes Continue

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Last Wednesday during a Public Utility Committee meeting, Austin Water Utility Director Greg Meszaros told members of Council that both his department and Austin Energy (which handles billing for AWU) are in the process of securing third-party firms to conduct audits of their meter reading and billing processes. Preliminary findings should be available at the next Public Utility Committee meeting in mid-Decem­ber. By January's meeting, Meszaros says, the two departments hope to have completed their respective audits and have a list of subsequent recommendations from each outside agency. What happens after that currently remains some bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo.

The audits arrive after two-and-a-half months spent trying to figure out why so many people throughout the city saw their summer water bills reach unreasonably high usage figures. Households that typically used around 2,000 gallons every month were getting charged for 13,000, with neighborhoods in the city's southwest region getting hit with inflated bills en masse. Both Austin Water and Austin Energy denied any systemic issues at the time, noting that bill accuracy usually falls "in the 99-plus percent range." But a quick review of Sept. 2014's city audit on the water billing process indicated that both departments lack the necessary scrutiny to review a city's worth of meter readings and billings with pinpoint accuracy.

As explained in the audit – conducted, in part, because of findings last February that Corix, a Buda-based company that works in water utility infrastructure, wasn't conducting accurate reads of water meters – AE and AWU's joint review process for meter readings is woefully inexact. In fact, restrictions were so loose that initial readings conducted by Corix prior to the audit wouldn't get flagged when they ran through the computer-based billing system funnel unless the figures amounted to more or less than four times the household's typical figures. Speaking last Wednesday, Elaine Kelly-Diaz, vice president of customer account management at AE, told Council members that additional systems are now in place to combat that expansive range; meter readers are prompted to verify the numbers if they breach an atomically configured cap; and AE has introduced a second internal method to align with the aforementioned flaggings. More than a year later, however, the department has only conducted one preliminary review to determine whether or not the adjustments actually worked.