Irricana Town council passed a motion on May 20, that will see penalties for outstanding water bills waived for one month.
Interim CAO Bob Payette said the over charging stemmed from the Town estimating meter readings because of the amount of snow this past winter.
“We had a pretty rough winter, which made it pretty difficult to do meter reads,” Payette said. “So we had two or three months that were estimated reads.”
“There were quite a few reads that were higher than expected.”
Irricana Mayor Valerie Squires said the May water bills reflect the adjustment between the estimated and the actual reads.
“As a result, many residents have a much higher bill than normal,” Squires said.
“The intent of this motion was to allow residents a little more time to pay this particular water bill.”
“This will not affect the budget in any significant amount,” Payette said. The interim-CAO estimated the number of the penalties to be graced to be in the low hundreds of dollars.
Brenda Campbell, administrative assistant for the Town of Irricana, said the problem for many residents could have resulted from simple things like leaking toilets.
“It’s the guys who have $600 water bills that we discovered they probably had a not so much a leak, but a (defective) toilet in that time period,” Campbell said to council.
Since the meter readings were estimated, some of these problems have gone unnoticed by residents and the Town.
Campbell suggested that more accurate meter reads could be done with automatic meter readings (AMR) through radio monitors.
“If we had radio monitors, we would know exactly the day it was stuck, the hour it was stuck, how much water they use,” Campbell said. “But we don’t have that technology in the metering system we have right now.”
There are two ways the radio monitor system works with AMRs, two-way and one-way. The two-way works by sending a signal to a transmitter.
Payette said that the cost of upgrading all the systems could be too much for the Town.
“For each meter, the cost isn’t significant,” Payette said.
“But if you multiply it by the number of houses in Town, then we can’t afford that price with our budget.
Payette said the project could cost more than $100,000 for the Town.
“As we move ahead with individual meters,” Payette said.
“We can replace them with new technology.”
