The first volley came in July, when water rates went up 11.5 percent in the largest annual increase since 1992. Then five months later, the New York City Council dodged another, mid-year increase that the City threatened, voting to allow the NYC Department of Environmental Protection to sell water-bill non-payment liens to outside buyers — even though the DEP itself concedes it has poor billing procedures and records. So these buyers, it turns out, can now sue building-owners for even incorrectly billed amounts.

And for co-op and condo boards, it's not easy to learn even those amounts, let alone the correct amounts due. When boards try to see how much their buildings owe, they find that, for instance, their water bills aren't online. In fact, the city's Byzantine water bureaucracy is so confounding that whole companies have sprung up that specialize in auditing city water bills. One of them, MyWaterMeter.com, states baldly on its website without fear of slander that the DEP "constantly makes billing errors...We find overlapping bills, estimated bills, and bills for meters that don't exist."

Councilman James F. Gennaro of Queens, chairman of the Environmental Protection Committee and an advocate of the change, told Habitat before the vote that even he was worried over whether the DEP had "an accurate enough billing system to allow the council to feel comfortable giving them this increased enforcement capability, which could result in people losing their property, losing their homes." The DEP's water-billing system has been so bad, in fact that buildings sometimes don't receive a water notice for years.

No Bills for Years

"If they haven't billed you for ten years and suddenly bill you all at once, where did they get the number?" asks attorney Steven Wagner, a partner in Wagner Davis. "If you get an outrageous bill, you should check immediately whether the amount of water reported to have been consumed is anywhere close to typical. You have to challenge it promptly, since once the decision is final, there's a very limited time to challenge – four months from date of final determination."

And those four months include any time you spend trying to negotiate a realistic figure. "If you're negotiating," Wagner cautions, "you have to make sure you're not using up your time."

If negotiations aren't promising, the board can file an "Article 78" lawsuit, which lets you challenge actions by state and local government agencies; the judge reviewing the case has the power to prevent the agency from taking action until the issue is resolved.

Two options on the road map so far are a new dispute-resolution form and an online payment option, both at the DEP website. "We've revamped our customer service, since there were a number of problems about exactly the kinds of things you're talking about right now," says DEP spokesperson Michael Saucier. "There are ways to resolve these things, and it all starts with a phone call. The wait time," he adds, "has been improved dramatically."

The DEP has also mailed incentive offers to more than 8,000 residential accounts – you may have received one – offering to drop late charges if the account is settled immediately. It also offers to cut off water service in 90 days if it isn't. The mayor's office says this won't happen to residential buildings – it's an issue of hygiene and public health, with a spokesperson having said "it often hurts innocent tenants and has no effect on those who don't pay the bill." But the DEP, regardless, has been busy rattling the pipes – and has indeed occasionally cut water service to commercial users, mostly as a high-visibility warning to others.

So, whither water bills? Up and up, most likely. The city estimates that the capital improvements needed to maintain the city's water supply system will cost $16 billion between 2005 and 2015, and the water board (the seven-member Municipal Water Finance Authority operated by the DEP) is mandated to charge water and sewer rates "sufficient to pay the costs of operating and financing the system."

Unfortunately, says Gennaro, "The administration diverts scores of millions of dollars every year to the city's general fund from the water and sewer revenues. In fiscal year 2007, which ended in June, $60 million in water and sewer fees paid to the city by the water board went to the city's general fund, which is not something we should be doing. The figure will be $76 million this year. Some of the payments go for legitimate water-related stuff, but a growing component does not."

In other words, be prepared to spend money like water. Just don't swallow the first billing figure you get.

Adapted from Habitat January 2008. For the complete article and more, join our Archive >>