Lunn-Rhue isn't alone. This fall, Englewood residents received water bills that didn’t add up, with soaring charges and nonsensical usage graphs showing triple the previously measured water usage for many customers.
After Westword compiled six different water bills from Englewood residents, a pattern emerged: water usage graphs at the top of each bill showed zero use for anyone in July, August or September, but then a skyrocketing bar for October.
October water bills generally totaled over $300, with bills in the previous months at around $70 or less. Some bills reached even more shocking heights. One person, who asked to remain anonymous, received a $436.56 invoice on November 7, but the bill didn’t disclose how much water the resident was being charged for. That number represented double the resident’s August bill.
Scott Ridl, a three-year resident of Englewood, shared his last twelve months of bills, all of which were around $90 until this August, when his bill shot up to $192; in September, it hit $233. Previously, Ridl’s highest consumption was 7,000 gallons of water, but his bills from Englewood Utilities say his home used 30,000 gallons in August and 38,000 in September.
Englewood is currently undergoing a massive project to switch all residents to modern and accurate meters. Additionally, a little over 1,000 Englewood households have no meter at all and are billed by an estimate of usage by a four-person household. Eighteen months from now, every resident in Englewood will have a new meter.
“What we find is when we bring someone off a flat rate with no meter and onto a metered service, their bill actually goes down,” Pieter Van Ry, director of Englewood Utilities, says. “That's more often than not what happens. There's the few people who use a lot of water, and when they go off of a flat rate onto a meter, it's actually accurately reflecting their water usage.”
Van Ry says the swap is going well for most people, but Lunn-Rhue and several other residents who've received a new meter aren't sure the measurement system works. Lunn-Rhue was previously billed with an estimate for a family of four, and thought his bill would be lower since only he and his wife live in their home with a small yard. Instead, his bills have jumped around inconsistently, with that giant $322 bill in September, a $68.70 bill in October, a $233 bill in November and a $303 bill in December.
Lunn-Rhue is so frustrated that he’s trying to get the city to audit his new meter or remove it. He says he doesn't know what he's paying for or what his home's usage is, based on the bill. But according to Van Ry, the meters aren’t the problem. It’s the billing software.
Englewood utility regulators say bills look outlandish because of a problem with the new software provider the city is using to revamp billing. The fees based on meter readings are accurate, Englewood Utilities insists, but the usage might not be showing correctly on bills. According to Englewood Utilities, high charges in October and November stem from an unsuccessful software switch in July and a delay in August as the problem was addressed, plus a hot, dry fall that caused people to water their yards for longer.
“Each month the software provider would send this thing that said, 'Yep, it's fixed,' and then we go off and test it and say, 'Well, no, it's not fixed,'” says Van Ry. “It's been this back-and-forth for five months on these issues that just seem to persist.”
Englewood Utilities estimates the software problem — which is causing usage numbers to not show up at all or to show up incorrectly on bills — will be fixed by January.
The City of Englewood first entered into a contract with Cogsdale Corporation to redo its billing system in 2021. The goal is to provide more information about bill charges and fees that is more digestible to customers, but Cogsdale hasn’t been able to show correct data for all Englewood customers. Cogsdale did not reply to a request for comment.
“The background information — the actual collection of data, the metering, the information — all that is accurate,” Van Ry says. “The problem is translating that to a billing template so that someone can look at their bill and say, ‘I use this much water, I have this much cost associated with it, and it was over this many days.’”
Van Ry says Englewood Utilities understands why customers are frustrated; they are, too, as they have repeatedly been told that the problems are fixed, only for another month of bills to show up incorrectly.
Englewood residents are grappling with high bills and inaccurate usage charts, like this one.
Screenshot of Resident Useage Graph
However, residents are tired of waiting for the problem to be fixed and believe they are facing incorrectly high bills because of the issue.
Jeffrey Engelken says he doesn't receive his water bills until nearly the end of the month, leaving him with almost no time to examine and pay them without risking late fees. His bills in the latter half of 2024 have also been inconsistent: He's received bills for June 4 to July 19, from July 20 to September 1, and one bill from September 1 to October 1.
“There's no rhyme or reason to the length of time for each bill, which makes comparison a little bit difficult,” Engelken says. “I had water billed to me on that first bill, and then there was no water bill for the second; it was only the sewer and other things. Then, the third month, there was water again. Then, last month, no water.”
Engelken says his water bill has doubled during this time period, owing to his usage doubling from previous years. He thinks his bill is higher because he’s being charged for two months on any given bill, but he still doesn't know why this is all happening.
Engelken called the utility company because his water usage, according to his bills, had skyrocketed. According to him, his home's highest month of usage was 13,000 gallons before this fall, when it totaled 22,000 gallons in one bill and 34,000 in another. Even if his water usage were divided by two after being billed for two months, that monthly total would be 17,000.
Englewood Utilities told him his new meter is simply reflecting his water use more accurately.
“I'm somewhat confused by how the old equipment could be so inaccurate that there's a 4,000-gallon difference from one year to the next in the same time period,” Engelken says. “I was on a watering schedule for my irrigation that was actually less than what I'd been doing in the previous fall, when I had my highest consumption.”
Van Ry says the Englewood Utilities customer service department has spent most of the last few months on the phone with thousands of customers trying to explain what’s going on with each person’s bill. People usually realize the charges make sense after talking it over...but they can't make sense of the bills they receive.
Van Ry encourages customers to call and talk to customer service, but he warns that wait times are long, so you may have to call multiple times before reaching someone, especially at the beginning of the month.
“The message we want to get out is if you're confused by your bill, please call us, because we will take the time to walk you through it,” he says. “If we find something that's wrong, we want to fix it. There have been things that we've caught because the customer has brought us an issue.”
Lunn-Rhue thinks it should be the opposite: He wants the city to reach out to customers and explain what is going on with their bills after reviewing each individually.
“Englewood is not a super-wealthy place,” he says. “There's a lot of people that have lived here forever. There's a lot of old people. So I can't imagine someone being on a fixed income and getting hit with an extra $350 or their bill not coming through for three, four months, and then they get hit with a $500, $600 bill.”
Van Ry says that criticism about bill transparency is valid, but he promises the city is doing everything in its power to fix that issue, including meeting with a Cogsdale vice president this month.
“The irony of all this is that one of the main purposes of this process is to create more transparency for our customers to see what their what their bill is,” Van Ry says. “Because of these problems, it's created a challenge in exactly what one of the primary goals of the project was, and so that's why the customers are frustrated. We, as a utility provider, are frustrated, but we will persist in getting it fixed and getting it right. Hopefully by January this is corrected.”
Lunn-Rhue isn’t waiting until January to take action. He works with pipeline infrastructure in his day job, so he applied to the empty seat on Englewood’s water and sewer board. Interviews for the position will start on January 13.
“I’m hoping to get in there and at least try and start cleaning things up and figuring out what went wrong,” he says. “If I can't get in there, I'm really going to push the city to have them do some sort of audit or investigation into what happened, because that's all of our taxpayer money.”
The city has postponed shutoffs and late charges until March as it works to fix the problem. In the meantime, people can look for utility updates on the city's website.
