Earlier this month “strong” mayor Mrakas along with Clr. Thompson, and a failed council candidate for Ward 2 went all the way to Washington out of concern for the great lakes stating that Aurora relies on the great lakes for its water supply.
Back here in Aurora a resident who relies on the town for delivering their water supply received this water bill:
Yes, that’s right $288,263.64. Due by April 22nd or they stand to incur a late charge of $14,000.
This customer must take great comfort in the town clearly stating it is “payable at most financial institutions”.
Back in January I posted on how the town had to send out notice that they had sent out double charges on accounts in error, but this isn’t a double charge scenario. Check the past usage of less than 300 m3 and compare it to the listed current usage at 100,000 m3.
Here is some context with respect to volumes of water.
1 m3 = 1,000L
An olympic swimming pool that is 25m wide, 50m long at a depth of 2m = 2,500 m3.
A more standard swimming pool that is 10m wide, 25 m long at a depth of 1.5m = 375 m3
A 200L rain barrel like the $70 ones the town is selling to “preserve water and cut costs!” = 0.2 m3
So this customer is being charged the equivalent of filling 40 olympic size pools, 266 standard pools or 500,000 rain barrels during this billing period.
The question shifts from is it possible to is it probable.
Previous to that there were other customers recently one with a bill for $6,518 and another for $6,227.
This needless waste of water and incurring of expense could easily be avoided if customers had the ability to be notified of a change in their usage via an alert.
King township does this currently where residents can input a threshold and they will be notified in a short turnaround 1/2 hours of a spike in usage by email or text:
That is a crucial closing of the loop with the customer. And we should have that in place here in Aurora, except that meter installation was promised by staff, then delayed as noted in my July post.
I have seen no questioning, or even acknowledgement by any member of council during budget discussions so I assume they are all happily complacent with these ongoing issues.
What I’m more concerned with is what checks an balances are in place within the town.
Why wouldn’t an alert go off at the town when a threshold is reached?
A double in consumption is of concern, and even explainable but when we learn a user is just flat out allowed to draw 100,000 m3 of water I would expect there is a system where alarm bells are going off.
Would this extreme usage not justify attempts to contact the customer, or at a certain threshold temporarily disconnect the service? If not, why not?
Why would those responsible for managing this department allow a bill of this magnitude not only from being generated but to be printed and mailed to a client?
Having a customer receive a bill like this erodes the trust the community has in the town as evidenced by these comments from the post:
Aurora has automated the wrong part of the process. We don’t need automatic billing, we need automatic monitoring and alerts that are flagged and managed by real people.
Sadly this is just a drop in the bucket of how the leadership at Aurora council is failing to get things done.
However there is always one optimist in the comments:
#WeakAssMayor
#WaterInfrastructureUnderspending
#AbsenceOfOversight
- UPDATE :
Watts Trending 