$1.5 million water bill doesn't float

Boulder worker's tiny error raises bigger questions

Ryan Morgan, Daily Camera

Published May 14, 2007 at midnight

Text size

More Local News

BOULDER - By mistaking the digit 8 for a 5 on a water meter, a Boulder city employee started a chain of events that led to a customer getting overcharged by $1.5 million in March.

Before it was discovered, the error led utility officials to think briefly that their revenues were up by more than 50 percent for the first quarter, and it led some critics to question whether the city's new water billing system was faulty.

Typically, water meters are read electronically. But about 1 percent of the time, the electronic system fails, and the meter has to be read manually. That's what happened in the case of the $1.5 million water bill, which was sent to a multifamily residential unit that the city won't identify.

The person reading a water meter looks at two figures: a "read from" number, which indicates the number of gallons on the meter at the beginning of the billing cycle, and the "read to" figure, which indicates the number of gallons at the end of the cycle. The "to" figure is subtracted from the "from" number to get the number of gallons the customer used.

In this case, the customer's meter started at 6,625 - which means 6,625,000 gallons - and had run up to 6,821. But the employee who wrote the numbers down made a mistake in recording the second number, writing 6,521 instead.

Subtract 6,625,000 from 6,521,000 and you get negative-104. But when presented with a negative number, the billing system assumes the meter's gone all the way around, like a car's odometer. Subtract 104 from the meter's top reading of 100,000, and you get a bill for using 99.8 million gallons, which will cost you a cool $1.2 million.

The customer also was overcharged for wastewater use by $349,000, running the total bill up to $1.5 million.

Ned Williams, Boulder's utilities chief, said the city has systems in place that typically flag down a bill that's alarmingly high - in this case, 500 times the normal amount.

But, he said, "In this case, there were several human activities that caused the alarms not to work properly."

The erroneous bill raised questions about the city's new method of charging its customers for water. The system, which was designed to encourage conservation, changed the way Boulder water customers are charged for what they use.

Before, customers were allocated water based on the amount they used during winter months. During the summer, customers could use up to 3 1/2 times that amount per month to water their lawns, and they would pay a higher rate for every gallon of water they used above that amount.

In creating the new system, the city conducted aerial surveys of customers' properties, then subtracted houses, driveways and sidewalks. The remaining landscape is the customer's "total irrigable area," and customers get a water budget to keep their lawns healthy. Customers pay $5 per thousand gallons for water they use above their budgeted amount - twice the amount they pay for water within the budget.

Many customers have complained to the city that the new budgets don't give them nearly enough water. The multifamily residential bill provided by the city shows that even with the million-plus-dollar error wiped out, the customer's water use was far outside its budget.

Sheila Horton, who heads the Boulder County Rental Housing Association, said she's heard many complaints from her members.

"We've seen significantly increased bills," she said. "We've seen tremendous spikes."

Williams said he's heard those complaints from homeowners' associations and other customers about the budget. It's not yet clear whether customers are paying much more for their water because utility employees are still working to retrieve data from the new system - including basics such as how many gallons of water the utility has sold this year and who's paying how much for it.

Williams said that data should be available by the end of the month.

City Manager Frank Bruno said it's too soon to tell whether the new water billing system is working as intended. Asked whether he's worried the system isn't yet providing data, Bruno said he'd be more concerned if he hadn't been assured that information will be forthcoming.

"If someone on my staff were to tell me, 'We're not going to be able to tell you,' I'd be really concerned," he said. "But the information is in there, and we're in the process of extracting that data and we're going to have it at our fingertips, so I relax a little bit."

Bruno said he's glad the error was caught but said it should have been discovered sooner.

"A million-dollar error has a lot of weight and meaning to me. My staff has heard me say that this is unacceptable, and they know that I feel that way," he said.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News