North Marin Water District is waiving all tiered charges for water from Nov. 10 through Jan. 5, forgoing an estimated $50,000 in revenue, after a rogue meter reader made up water use data for as many as 15 or 20 percent of customers.
The issue came to light in recent months, as the district fielded numerous complaints of high bills. “We were perplexed,” said Chris DeGabriele, the district’s general manager.
The district originally believed the high bills were the result of the lifting of the mandatory water conservation measure of 2015 or intensive summer irrigation, but customers kept complaining. After a closer look, district staff found a pattern: “high use often immediately followed abnormally low use that had occurred during the prior (summer) billing,” a district memo said.
Then staff found that one meter reader, hired in 2015, had entered meter readings pretty fast—in fact, “at a speed that defied reason,” the memo said.
Typically, the district sends its crew of meter readers on various routes through Novato and West Marin to check the meters. The meter readers then enter the numbers into a handheld electronic device.
But one meter reader, whose name has not been released by the district, decided to take a shortcut and just estimate water use.
“He had apparently determined that by entering low reads into the billing system, customers would receive a low bill and would not call to complain, thereby allowing him to perform his work without the trouble of reading every meter,” the memo said.
The problem surfaced during the next billing period, since district policy prohibits the same person from taking the same route two times in a row. When the second meter reader came along and entered accurate numbers—the total water use overtime was accurate, since meters keep clicking up—it seemed that many customers had used large amounts of water in a single billing period. And the district’s tiered rates meant that the bills were quite high.
The rogue meter reader was fired, the memo said, though the district found that when complaints started coming in, the number of speedy meter readings began to fall.
Was the falsifier in our midst? “We do know that the individual did read in West Marin during the suspect period,” Mr. DeGabriele said.
The district is taking additional measures to prevent such falsification in the future, including implementing random field audits of meter readings, revising daily reports to make it easier to determine if meters are being read too quickly, and making sure meter readers do not take the same route in consecutive periods.
In the long term, though, human error may be eliminated entirely. This winter, the district is planning a pilot project in Novato with meters that can be read remotely. They hope to implement such meters with all customers sometime in the next two years.