Residents air concerns with billing, customer service at Water Works Board community meeting

Hoover residents and business owners came to tonight's Birmingham Water Works Board community meeting with their water bills in hand, seeking answers to inconsistent bills, unreturned phone calls and meter reading questions.

The community meeting, held at the Hoover Met's banquet room, included several dozen Hoover citizens, Mayor Frank Brocato, members of the City Council and representatives from the BWWB's management, engineers, meter reading, IT and customer service departments.

“What we’ve tried to do is bring our office to you,” Assistant General Manager of Finance and Administration Michael Johnson said.

The meeting was originated by Trace Crossings resident Alene Gamel after having issues with billing at her own home and hearing from homeowners with similar issues. She came to Brocato with her complaints and emails from other Hoover citizens, and he helped connect with the BWWB to plan the community meeting.

“I gave him a stack of emails from neighbors to complain, … he took the bull by the horns,” Gamel said, adding that residents were "not just here to hear excuses. They can actually get some answers.”

BWWB public information officer Rick Jackson said the BWWB holds community meetings for neighborhoods and homeowners associations occasionally when there is interest in knowing more about how the water service works. The BWWB reads 200,000 meters on a monthly basis.

“That’s 2.4 million opportunities to make a mistake [annually],” Johnson said. “There’s a lot of activity all the time.”

Most of the questions posed by the audience at tonight's meeting centered around sudden rate hikes in their water bills and how frequently their meters are read. One resident said her bill went from $65 to more than $300 in a single month, and a plumber found no signs of a leak.

Not all of these complaints were fully answered during the general meeting due to their individual details being too different for a broad answer. There were BWWB staff on hand to meet with residents one-on-one to discuss billing problems that couldn't be answered in the general meeting, and Johnson said the staff gathered contact information to follow up with homeowners who couldn't stay.

“Our goal when we leave here today is to have everyone’s name and number who has a question,” he said.

Despite BWWB representatives' demonstration of the meter reading system, which they described as difficult to fake, multiple Hoover residents spoke of instances when they saw meter reading trucks pass by several houses without stopping to read the meters.

General Manager Mac Underwood said the best thing to do in those instances is to note the number on the side or back of the truck and immediately report the incident to the BWWB, so they can compare GPS tracking on the trucks with their intended routes. Johnson said afterward that this meeting will prompt double checking of some routes, especially those that cover addresses of homeowners who mentioned seeing readers skip houses, so they could follow up on any employees failing to do their jobs.

“We want to read your meter every month, we want to bill you accurately,” Underwood said. “I can promise you that employee will be addressed.”

The company tracks each home's average water usage and Johnson said anything outside the norm triggers a notice to reread the meter and confirm the reading. Re-readings are done by the same employees who normally work those routes, though Johnson said they must do it on paper rather than using their electronic systems, so the likelihood of them memorizing a made-up reading is low.

Hoover homeowners also described attempts to address problems by calling the Water Works Board, but they did not receive calls back.

“The system’s broken, something’s not working, and then in my mind whether you want to think this or not, there’s borderline corruption because no one wants to call me back,” one man said.

A customer service representative, Shirley Russell, said the call center receives 2,100 calls in an average day and cannot always return calls within a reasonable time window. However, she said they are working on changes in the system to improve that.

To report a leak, break or other issue, Assistant General Manager of Engineering and Maintenance Sonny Jones recommended using the website's reporting system, as he said it creates an email that goes to around eight different people. They can then determine which of 14 crews should be sent to the site to address the problem. Jones said including as much detail as possible and a picture makes it easier to resolve an issue.

“I’m telling you, that is the best way to report a leak,” Jones said. “I see every single leak request that you enter on the internet.”

However, Jones noted that some issues can take several days to address if they have to work with other utility lines and figure out who owns the water line with the problem.

“This system is gigantic. We have 6,000 miles of water lines,” he said. “Stay patient with us. It’s a process, we work through it.”

BWWB staff also brought information and demonstrations on how the meters work, how they read meters covered in debris, meter lifespans, reading the billing rates and ways to check for leaks in a home's water system. The company has tools to clean off meter covers or get a clear reading through water, mud or other debris.

One of the things many BWWB customers don't understand, representatives said, is the way that their bills are calculated. There are different rates per hundred cubic feet of water, depending on each home's usage levels. Each tier of rates is determined by how many CCFs, or 100 cubic feet (748 gallons), of water a home has used.

Water bills round down to whole CCF numbers, which means that a customer who uses slightly more than one CCF of water in a month will only pay for that one, but the remainder will roll over to the next month and could cause that bill to be higher than average.

Read more about the BWWB billing rates here. Johnson said redesigns to the look of each month's bill are also in the works.

Bluff Park resident Maxine Barnes said she primarily came to the meeting to learn about rates and customer service, and she left feeling that her questions had been answered. She also had been given business cards for a more direct way to reach BWWB staff with future problems.

"We all have a lot of the same problems," Barnes said of her neighbors that attended the meeting. "I do feel they addressed that quite well."

To set up a similar community meeting or ask a BWWB representative to come to a neighborhood meeting, contact Rick Parker at 244-4221.