Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer recently described the city’s water billing system as “a roller coaster ride of bizarre billing intervals.”
Typically, residents are supposed to receive a water bill every two months – and the city is mandated to send six bills a year.
But since Hurricane Helene brought chaos to the municipal water system last fall, many residents report receiving bills erratically. In some cases, customers have been billed for up to four months at a time for water and stormwater services.
Pharmacy technician Jackie Waller is one of those people. Normally, her bill is around $120 every two months. This month, she received a bill that was $383. The bill had an extra long payment period, from late September through mid-February.
As the only full-time provider for her family, Waller runs a tight budget. She lives with her husband, who is retired, and also supports her son in college. The large bill, she said, has been a source of stress.
“We're living just right there. Right there on the edge,” she said. “And then when you hit us with something a little bigger, that's not planned in your budget, it’s like, who am I going to rob from Paul to pay Peter? And where am I going to fall behind on who to get?”
During the city’s 53-day water crisis, residents weren’t charged as non-potable water couldn’t be used, David Melton, the city’s Water Resources Director, confirmed.
However, the temporary suspension in billing compacted billing cycles, resulting in unexpectedly large bills like the one Waller received.
During a recent City Council budget planning session, some elected leaders asked what options exist for residents who have unexpectedly high bills.
Melton said the city will “work with people who are delinquent” on payments and help set up a payment plan.
Hurricane Helene water outages are one reason for erratic bills, but the major issue is old meters, which are dying faster than the city can replace them. When the meters die, then city workers have to take water measurements by hand, according to David Melton, the city’s director of water resources.
“In our current system, we're having to read a lot of those manually, probably 50% of them,” he said. “So that's for lack of better words, messed up our billing cycles.”
A manual inspection takes more time and resources, which is why bills get delayed.
Clay Chandler, the city’s water spokesperson, said the meter disarray is “an existing problem that Helene exacerbated.”
“The old water meters were installed between 2010-12, and their shelf life generally is between 12-15 years. They started dying at a rate we couldn't keep up with a little more than a year ago,” he told BPR in an email.
Further exacerbating the problem of billing are outdated transmitters, which sometimes fail to provide real-time data on water usage to the city. For some, this has led to water bills that are near zero one month and then unusually high the next month.
The city has been working on the problem. Two years ago, Asheville launched a $28.8 million water meter replacement project, known as the Advanced Metering Project. The project aims to replace 63,000 antiquated meters citywide, enabling a transition from bi-monthly to monthly billing. When complete, the system will also allow people to monitor their water consumption through a real-time dashboard.
As of this month, the project is around 50% complete, Chandler said.
“Helene put work on hold (obviously) but new water meters started going back in the ground in late January,” he said.
Council to vote on rate hikes in April
As the city works to replace old meters, leaders plan to increase water rates for a second year, as part of a three-year phased rate hike.
Residential customers face a 7.5% rate increase, while commercial users would pay between 14.1% and 32.2% more, depending on water use.
“Currently, the average residential user sees a bill of about $55 every two months,” Melton said. “Under the proposed rate structure for next year, that would go up by roughly $4. So a $4 increase every two months for the average residential user.”
Commercial users, on the other hand, could see their bills more than double, with some facing hundreds or thousands of dollars in increases.
Over the last decade, residents paid more for water than commercial operations, the Asheville Citizen-Times reports. With these rate hikes, the city is trying to even those numbers out by charging more money from business and commercial customers.
The increases are intended to help pay for capital projects. Pre-Helene, officials estimated planned infrastructure projects will cost $239 million over the next five years, including the meter replacement project and the expansion of the Mills River water facility.
Council members will vote on a water fee increase on April 8.
These rate hikes come at a tough time for local businesses, many of whom are struggling to recover from the water crisis. Restaurants, in particular, have battled financially in the wake of Helene, after many of them spent thousands of dollars on the clean water they needed to operate their business.
Council member Maggie Ullman voiced her support for the changes.
“We spent a lot of time digging into the water work last year and had I think very thoughtful, diligent consultants do very technical analysis and I still feel very good about the three-year plan we've made,” she said. “I hope that we can stay on the path that we set last year for water fee changes.”
