Often suing a municipality is about getting an injunction (“hey, stop breaking the utility billing laws, sincerely, A. Judge.”) not necessarily a cash grab.
I once lived in a smallt town, and I was going on vacation, and I went to the city clerk office to pay it a month ahead. They said the accounting system is not set up to pay unbilled amounts in advance. I said I’d be on vacation, so they told me to just have a friend come in pay it for me.
So I called the mayor, who happened to be a good friend of mine, and said “Jerry, will you pay my water bill for me?” and he said “Just pay it in advance.” I told him about the conversation I had with the office, and told him he was my nominated friend. Since everybody in town knew him, I though it was really nice of him to take care of everybody’s water bill for them.
And the next morning, there was suddenly a provision in the accounting system to accept payments in advance. In other words, the clerk was told to get up off her dead ass and figure out a place to put a check until it was due. Sometimes that’s all it takes.
So do you like it when your neighbours cut your water off when you’re a day late with the payment?
Yes, towns are financed by taxpayers. But that shouldn’t mean the town is immune from a lawsuit when it screws up, especially if it’s acting contrary to state law, as some posters have suggested may be the case here.
I live within my means and have no problem paying all my bills on time. If I didn’t pay a bill, I would expect the service to be shut off!
Your mortgage bill probably says something like “your mortgage is past due on the 15th day after the due date, failure to make payment within 15 days after the due date will result in your payment being late”. What if you didn’t make your payment by the 2nd day after the due date and someone from the bank along with a police officer showed up with a foreclosure notice and asked you to vacate the premises?
All those bills you pay on time, look at any of them. Cable, water, gas, electricity (moreso for utilities than non-necessary services), all of them explain what happens in the event of a late payment, all of them following guidelines laid down by local jurisdictions and state law designed to keep people safe in the event that the didn’t just miss a payment by accident or fell behind for some reason. None of them, that I’ve heard of, allow water, gas or heat to be shut off for a single payment being a single day late.
In my area, from what I’ve heard, you can go months without paying your energy bill before they’ll cut it off and I don’t think they’ll do it in Winter.
Also, for the record, your post very much looks like ‘I pay my bills, if you don’t that’s your problem’. This thread really has nothing to do with the people that pay their bills, in fact, it’s not even about if they have the ability to pay them. It’s about what happens between missing the first payment and having the service shut off. Can you honestly say you’d be okay with having your water shut off because your check didn’t get there on time? What if they city screwed up? Still be okay with that? Last year my city screwed up and marked the due date as the mailing date so everyone’s bills came past due. Couple that with an automatic shut off instead of 5-20 days notice (which would have bought some time to fix things) and there would have been a much bigger problem.
But, hey, you got yours.
Well done ! You are one of the Wise Virgins, not one of the Foolish ones.
We just moved and somehow our gas bill didn’t get properly routed to our new address. We went three months before one of us realized, hey, have either of us paid a gas bill for the new house yet? Turns out the gas company was billing it to the N Streetname Ave instead of S Streetname Ave, where I live. Good thing they didn’t have “instant shutoff.”
Yes, we live well within our means and pay bills on time, but sometimes shit like this happens. Or a credit card expires or is cancelled because of suspected fraud (as has happened to me about four or five times in the last two years) and you forget to update the auto-pay information. Stuff like that happens. Hell, even non-essential services like cable they’ll keep on for a couple of months before they shut it off, much less essential public utilities.
Ok so, update on how the meeting went. I watched a video of it someone posted, didn’t actually go myself. People were quite civil and some interesting information was given by the City Manager as to why this suddenly changed. He’s new, like under 6 months new. And at the meeting he divulged how badly the city really is doing financially. Apparently there’s over $150k in unpaid receivables just floating out there. The city is so bad off financially that they can’t even get a credit card. Then he went on to explain that this policy of shutting off after one day late has always existed but just was never enforced and that people got used to ‘not paying their bills and just paying whatever, whenever’. And that part of the reason water rates are so high is because everyone else is subsidizing the people who don’t pay. When people spoke up about some of the laws we found online (like Joey P earlier) we were told by the city lawyer that those laws only applied to private water sources. And that our city was not considered private. But it also didn’t fall under the Public Utility Commission for uh…reasons?? That our laws were ours and ours alone and the city wasn’t beholden to any other laws.
I looked up the city ordinance and it does indeed say that any bill not paid within 30 days of the due date (ie 1 day late) is subject to be shut off. No mention of notices or anything. Understandably people aren’t happy with this. The only good thing that seems to have come from it is that none of the city council members seemed to be aware that this sudden change in enforcement policy had been made. They motioned to review and possibly change the ordinances regarding shut offs in the next meeting. So…I dunno. It seems odd to me that there are NO laws at a state level that override city ones.
Yep. 
We lived in a small town when I was young. As somebody told my Dad-- “You don’t run for office; you take your turn.”
Too late for edit, what I meant to say was 30 days from the billing date. So bill is created on the 15th of one month, due 15th of the next. So 30 days from the date of billing.
I dunno, that doesn’t sound right. The law says “all water utilities” it doesn’t make a distinction between public or private or 'not public but not private.
It’s also set up so they can go and shut off the water for everyone that’s not paying…great, go shut them off. I’ll bet those people will probably be current within a few days, just like they did when their electricity was shut off. But they shouldn’t be shutting off other people’s water for being one day later because they can’t collect from the people that haven’t paid in 7 or 8 months. To me that sounds like ‘well, we just gave up on trying to collect from them, so we’re going to make the people we know will pay, pay faster’.
I still think you (or someone, but I bet they already did) need to call the Secretary of State. She laid down the law, she needs to get involved in this.
Scroll down to 860 on this page.
I’d send her an email (so there’s a ‘paper’ trail) and at the same time make a phone call. If what your town said about not having to follow the laws of the state (doubtful) she can tell you, and that’s that, if that’s not the case, the state can start and investigation.
Looks like Oregon’s public utility commission also has it’s own website that you could poke around at.
I understand that your city is in a cash crunch right now, but this isn’t going to solve it, they’re making more work for themselves (running around and turning off water just to go back and turn it back on a day later because these are people that usually pay), they’re creating problems with the citizens and now have to use resources to handle all the complaints and on top of it all they’re willing to risk putting people in danger…for what? To get their 30 bucks a few days earlier than they otherwise would have?
You should ask them how much their cash flow has increased after this new policy has been in place for a few months and how much more money they’ve spent on staff to handle dis/reconnects, phone calls and emergency meetings.
IOW, they people that always paid, will still pay, the people that weren’t going to pay sill aren’t.
Get the state involved.
I don’t know if this would be more hurt than help, but:
When (yes, CA) drought conditions required severe reductions in yard watering, one old biddy continued to dump so much water on her precious patch of grass that the water was flowing down the street.
They installed a flow reducer on her service line - all she could get was a trickle.
This uses the same technique as a shut-off, but would still allow (after a fashion) water service.
It would also point out the continued failure to pay would have even nastier consequences.
Kind of a “shot across the bow” before one “below the water line”, in Navy-speak.
Up here in the land of eternal darkness and snow… sorry, it’s been a nasty week… the electrical utilities use something similar in winter. Gas heated homes get a load limiter that allows enough juice to run the furnace fan and a light bulb. That way it’s inconvenient enough to get you to pay up but nobody dies.
Yes, here in the antipodes, where the relationship between voters and government is more collegiate, totally cutting off the water would be regarded as a health & sanitation problem.
Generally, I regard the American attitude to public health as crazy.
Next you’re going to say that you feel lucky to have water service at all, when your ancestors just a few generations back would have had to go down to the river or use rain barrels or whatever.
You are 100% correct! I woke up this morning and thought I would say exactly that. And here it is… 
You feel lucky to have water service at all, when your ancestors just a few generations back would have had to go down to the river or use rain barrels or whatever.
So I went in to volunteer at city hall this week and managed to get a moment to talk to one of the people involved in this decision. We talked about the city council meeting and I was like, you know people aren’t mad about being made to pay their bills. Noone’s saying they shouldn’t have to do that. But it’s the complete lack of notice and lack of payment arrangements that are really upsetting them. She responded that their notice is their bill they get and that people have been going too long thinking they don’t have to pay when it’s due. She also mentioned in regards to water bills, only 50% of the outstanding debt is collected pretty much consistently. The rest is just…not paid. I mentioned that maybe even some gesture like giving people actual notices before being shut off might go far in regaining some trust with the community and she said it was out of her hands. So apparently she isn’t involved directly in the decision making, only indirectly. And I don’t feel comfortable enough with the other guy to have the same conversation with him. There’s another council meeting on the 12th so we’ll see if anything is accomplished there. The city council members put the water bills on the agenda for actual discussion among them then.
This is why I live in big cities.
Not only have I never had a separate water bill, any agency that tried to cut off a utility for one day late payment would be harassed into oblivion.
Living in a rural setting, water (from my well) and septic are not billed at all.
Of course, you’re able to do this so we should instantly punish anyone who isn’t? :dubious:
Pretty darned heartless. Please be better.