After the waters of Hurricane Helene and Milton receded, the storms left a crashing surge of sky-high water bills for several St. Petersburg residents.
“Imagine my surprise when I received my utility bill in December of $1,439.21,” Northeast St. Pete resident Michelle Dudley said during public comments at the Feb. 20 City Council meeting.
“I was sure there was an error, as I had not lived in my home for three months.”
What makes her case even more unusual is who she was married to: Bill Dudley, a former St. Petersburg City Council member who died last April.
She added that the city’s customer service team told her – and her neighbor, who had a similar issue – that a leak must be causing the increased water usage. Despite Dudley’s insistence that she didn’t, she was told that the city will conduct an inspection and her bill must be paid in full in the meantime.
To help those facing similar situations, the city council unanimously approved resolutions to provide people with more flexibility when faced with unusually high water bills.
They set up procedures to assist residents who suffered from an “involuntary leak during flood event” or an unusually high meter reading in the absence of a leak.
People can appeal to the Utility Billing Review Committee (UBRC), and their water services won’t be terminated while the investigation is ongoing.
Council members previously voted not to cut off water to those with unpaid bills during a Feb. 6 meeting.
RELATED: St. Petersburg officials to investigate residents’ unusually high water bills
On Thursday, city utility service leaders also outlined possible reasons for the high bills.
Billing manager Lauren Gewandter said that water usage has to be estimated when an employee can't read any of the 98,000 city meters.
Meters may be blocked by debris, covered by overgrown grass or flooded.
Gewandter added that analog meters may also be “in poor condition,” with scratched and foggy lenses making it difficult to get a reading.
Robert Craven thinks a flooded meter might be the reason for his post-Helene water bill ballooning to six times the typical amount.
"I didn't hear anybody question these digital meters, which were submerged for an extended period of time during Helene, whether they were impacted at all," the Eden Isles resident said.
He thinks his digital meter, which was installed in December 2022, provided inaccurate readings and experiences “great fluctuations.”
Customer support manager David Flintom, however, sees digital meters as the way forward.
“Every read is going to be accurate pretty much every time, if not every single time,” he said. “I’m a big fan of those digital meters.”
In addition to going digital, Flintom mentioned two more measures to improve the 32-person field operations department:
- Switching from NaviLine – the current system that automatically calculates water bill estimates based on a previous 3-month average – to the Tyler project, which Flintom said would be a “more integrated system.”
- Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) which would eliminate the need for people to manually go out and read the meters, whether they're digital or analog.
Gewandter said high water consumption can also be reported due to running toilets and flood-induced leaks.
But Edgemoore resident Joseph Sowers doesn’t buy that.
"I would love to hear the theories as to why flooding would cause high water use, and then without any intervention, once the water receded, the water usage would stop,” he said. “It would seem improbable that rising water could turn on a faucet and receding water could turn it off."
He added that his father received four bills in five days last October. Sowers said the city staff he’s dealt with has been “excellent” and that it’s the management practices that he found problematic.
Three residents mentioned issues with customer service personnel being rude, absent or unclear when they tried to resolve their disputes.
As of Feb. 20, 900 customers still haven’t received a bill due to processing delays. Gewandter said they're making progress, as that's compared to the 2,400 delayed bills they had in December.
