Nobody asked about a rollback?

Good news! Sewerage and Water Board is about to fix your billing problems. You know, the problem everyone is having where there bill is too small every month.

The vast majority of customers should expect to see cost increases of about 10%, while a handful could see their bills go up as much as 25%, S&WB Project Manager Rebecca Johnsey told a City Council committee Monday. That's because the manual readers being replaced don’t actually capture the entirety of a customer's water usage. 

“Our meters in the ground are mechanical meters, and that means they have pieces on the inside that physically move. So over time, they get gunked up and they slow down, and it actually takes more and more water on the front end to start the movement,” Johnsey said.

About 10,000 "smart meters" have already been installed under a $67 million contract with California-based Aqua-Metric signed in December 2022, and the first bills will begin going out next week, S&WB executive director Ghassan Korban said Tuesday.

The initial round of bills will be no more than 120% of a customer's annual average, he said. After that, bills will reflect the precise reading of the smart meters.

Pretty neat the way they get super interested in the "precise" amount of water used once it gets past the point in the line where you have to pay for it.  How much gets dumped out into the ground before it arrives there, is anybody's guess. Sunk cost, right? 

Anyway, this article doesn't tell us how Aqua-Metric's "smart" meters work.  But, one assumes, they also have "pieces on the inside" that must do something.  Hopefully it isn't what any of the various smart meter vendors who ran roughshod over the state of Mississippi have been doing. 

From 2009 to 2017, at least 10 Mississippi cities signed contracts with the companies to install smart meters or other new technology. All but one have reported problems, and at least four have sued to recoup money they paid to Siemens, McNeil Rhoads or Mueller. Three of those suits are still pending.

Siemens and McNeil Rhoads, competitors that pitched the projects and acted as project managers, hired contractors who installed many meters improperly, according to officials in Jackson, McComb and Moss Point. In some cities, the two companies also struggled to link meters to the home office or to merge a new billing system with an old one.

Officials in at least eight Mississippi cities said they had problems with Mueller’s smart meters, which sometimes didn’t measure accurately because of faulty parts or batteries that died sooner than promised. Water departments in other states, including California and Missouri, have reported similar problems with Mueller meters over the past decade.

McComb, a city of 12,000 people south of Jackson, signed the first Siemens water meter contract in Mississippi. Mayor Quordiniah N. Lockley, city manager at the time, said McComb agreed to pay the company $10 million to install 6,000 smart Master Meters.

But contract workers hired by Siemens put them in backward and missed deadlines to install the antennas that the meters needed to communicate with a central office, Mr. Lockley said. Then some customers saw their water bills hit as much as $1,000 per month, with no obvious explanation.

At least S&WB is trying to get out in front with an "obvious explanation" before the bills start to go up. Or at least that's what City Council is urging them to do. 

Council members urged water board officials to “overdo” a campaign to inform the public about how the new meters will impact bills. Council member Eugene Green also asked the agency to hold community meetings in every council district.

“On the one hand, we can't not have people pay for service they're receiving, but on the other hand there will be sticker shock,” said Council member Joe Giarrusso.

Notice that none of your elected representatives has anything to say about the possibility that your bill is already too damn high.  They're not here to help with that so much as they are here to manage your expectations.  When property tax assessments threaten homeowners with "sticker shock" we at least get some effort at rolling back the millage rates in order to keep things under control.  But here we aren't so motivated. Did no one ask about rolling back the water rates? It's different when the revenue windfall comes off the back of a regressive user fee, I guess.  Poor people always pay their "fair share" first.