Water meters a hit, but do miss

After two straight months of single-digit water bills, Janas Dymon received an unwelcome holiday surprise courtesy of the Las Vegas Valley Water District: a December bill of $225.

When she called for an explanation, she was told she would have to pay up or have her water shut off.

About the same time, Dymon's next-door neighbor, David Gorka, was unwrapping his own bit of bad news from the water district.

Apparently, his meter had been under-read by almost 170,000 gallons over the last 13 months. The correction would cost him more than $400.

Both errors came as the result of mistakes by the utility's automated meter-reading system.

Water district officials insist problems with the system are isolated, and the bulk of remote readers work just fine. They have no plans to go back to the old way of reading meters.

Since 2002, nearly all district meters have been read using transmitters that beam consumption data from homes and businesses to meter service staff members driving slowly past with computers in their trucks.

District spokesman J.C. Davis said the system has a very high accuracy rate, but some mistakes are unavoidable.

What matters is "what you do when they happen," Davis said. "I think we were dealing with them really badly, and we need to do better."

In light of what happened to Dymon, Gorka and others, Davis said the district is reexamining some of its billing and customer service practices.

Possible changes include sending out more detailed explanations of bill adjustments and readily offering payment plans instead of "making people beg for them," Davis said.

"Just because they owe the money, that doesn't mean it's right to drop it on them all at once."

The proposed changes could be implemented soon.

The district recently raised its rates by an average of 23 percent as part of an effort to boost conservation among high-volume water users.

The higher rates will start showing up on customers' bills in April. If history is any guide, they will be followed in short order by a spike in complaint calls.

The last time the district raised rates, its monthly call volume swelled by 15 percent.

Like many utilities, the district converted to an automated meter-reading system to save money and improve efficiency. The effort has been "a smashing success" so far, Davis said.

"Instead of sending out a warm body to lift the valve cover, push the cockroaches out of the way, and actually put eyeballs on the meter, this is a device that does it for them. That's all it is, an electronic eye. It's done what we wanted it to do."

Out of more than 330,000 customers, about 2,000 were billed last year for adjustments resulting from meter reading errors.

"Your chances are six in a thousand of that happening," Davis said.

Another 4,000 customers received credits after misreads caused them to be overbilled.

Errors are caught when customers complain, though that's less likely when bills are too low. The water district also physically checks meters. Its policy is that it be done annually, but it's unclear whether that is happening.

Davis couldn't explain how two mistakes cropped up at neighboring houses at roughly the same time.

The remote readers are designed to last 10 years under ideal conditions. In the blast furnace of the Mojave Desert, the district has found itself replacing as many as 700 each month.

The devices cost $80 each, but the district only pays for about 10 percent of the ones it replaces. The rest are under warranty.

Battery failure is the most common problem. Occasionally, the sensors "pop off" when the adhesive used to mount them melts in the summer heat.

So-called "bad reads," where units send back the wrong information, are rare, Davis said. It is more common for a unit to send no reading at all, which happens when its signal is blocked by a parked car or it can't see the meter because its optical reader is fogged up.

"Nonreads" are no big deal, Davis said. Someone just has to go back out later and recheck the meter.

One shortcoming of the technology is the risk, as in Gorka's case, of an error being repeated for several months before anyone notices it. Manual readings presented no such problem.

"The chances of a guy screwing up your reading two months in a row is incredibly remote, so you'd get bill adjustments but they were little bill adjustments," Davis said. "We've got to reduce the duration of these. I'd like to see them caught after a month or two, not after eight months or a year."

Some safeguards are already in place. For example, the system is programmed to flag customer accounts when their monthly meter reading shows unusually high or low water use.

Two such warnings were ignored in Dymon's case. Then the mistake was compounded when the water she should have been charged for in October and November was lumped in with her December bill. As a result, her usage that month came in at a whopping 71,000 gallons, two-thirds of it billed at the district's highest rate for large-volume users.

"I can't tell you we did anything other than mangle this thing," Davis said. "I couldn't have drawn this one up any worse."

Gorka's case is different, he said, because the error was entirely technical and staff members handled it appropriately once the problem was discovered.

Gorka tells a different story.

"The customer service there is horrible. They won't reason with you at all," he said. "This is just ridiculous. There's just two of us here, and we water once a week" in the winter.

After she got her big bill, Dymon took to joking about having a retractable lawn with a hidden, Bellagio-style fountain underneath.

Her daughter went online and found a comparable volume of water: The massive kelp tank at the Birch Aquarium in San Diego contains about a thousand gallons less than what Dymon got billed for.

"We're trying to laugh our way through this, but it's not funny," she said. "They still can't prove to me I used that amount of water."

Dymon said the district eventually offered to knock almost $100 off her bill and spread the balance out over several months. She grudgingly accepted, but her anger did not subside.

Convinced she was still being ripped off, she shut off her irrigation system and all the water in her house except the line running into the back of her refrigerator. She kept a few jugs of water in her garage and used them to fill her toilet just enough for the occasional flush.

When that became unbearable, Dymon moved in with her daughter for two months.

"I decided screw it. I packed up and left," she said.

Dymon moved back into her southwest valley home about a week ago and started using water again, albeit sparingly. Summer is coming, though, and she knows she will have to switch on her sprinklers soon.

Before she does, Dymon has one request for the water district:

"I want a new water meter put in, and I want it set to zero, zero, zero, zero, zero."

Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean @reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0350.