Houston City Council may cut Harvey-spiked water bills

It could have been a dump truck, or maybe a fire truck, that gouged the ruts in Trish Hagner's front yard, still visible five months after Hurricane Harvey. Whatever it was, the floodwaters' departure weeks later showed the vehicle also had fractured a water pipe.

There were bigger issues, of course. Hagner and her husband made it safely out of Briargrove Park in west Houston, but their home of 18 years filled with chest-deep water and all but a few heirlooms were lost.

Amid the disruption and stress, a $1,049 September water bill from City Hall was the last thing Hagner needed.

For Hagner and more than 6,300 other households, the City Council on Wednesday will consider suspending its rules on water bill collections to forgive Harvey-related anomalies.

Houston Public Works found 6,362 homeowners' accounts doubled - or more - during or immediately after Harvey; 10 commercial or industrial accounts saw similar spikes.

In the weeks after the storm, Public Works flagged those accounts to prevent them from being disconnected or penalized for lack of payment and set up a hotline for residents to call.

About 30 percent of the affected owners filed FEMA claims before the end of November, and, if council approves, those homeowners would have their bills automatically reduced to their average monthly usage.

Any other homeowner who can show he or she filed a FEMA claim after Nov. 30, filed a private insurance claim related to Harvey, or can show other proof of Harvey damage would have to apply to qualify for the special bill adjustment. Those in that situation would need to present the relevant documents, along with an application, to Public Works within 90 days of council approval.

FEMA FEAR: Disaster victim activists concerned about FEMA's fairness, transparency

Beyond their control

The rule suspension also would partly reimburse homeowners who had to empty and refill their flooded pools; those residents would be billed only for the water used, rather than paying wastewater charges on the same volume, as typically would be the case.

"We're extremely happy to hear there's a possibility this could be resolved in some way," Hagner said. "We're people who pay our bills, but it didn't feel right to pay it, and it didn't feel right not to pay it, so we just kind of put everything on hold."

LISTEN: How a Houston investor buys and sells flooded homes

In Hagner's case, the pipe that broke fed her sprinkler system rather than her home; their bill would be adjusted down to about $200. She and her husband hope to move back within a week or two.

"We couldn't be in our house, we were overwhelmed trying to deal with all the financial impacts, and then to have something that was completely beyond our control hit like that for another $1,000 was a very emotional, stressful punch in the gut," Hagner said.

Alanna Reed, communications director for the Public Works department, called suspending the city's rules "the right thing to do."

"This speaks to the importance of the community letting us know when something's happening so we can work with them to come up with a solution," Reed said. "We need to be empathetic and do the right thing for these people."

Cheers and concerns

Reed said the department's testing showed the accuracy of the city's water meters was not to blame, noting that high bill complaints affect less than 1 percent of all accounts.

Still, though the vast majority of high Harvey bills came from residents whose homes flooded, she said 82 percent of the identified cases have no precise explanation.

The department does have plausible theories: Perhaps the refrigerator, floating away in the floodwaters cracked the icemaker water line and created a pressurized, days-long leak. Or, as in Hagner's case, a vehicle trying to make it through high water broke a buried water pipe.

Public Works estimates it will forego $650,000 on the nearly one-third of Harvey-affected accounts whose owners promptly filed FEMA claims, and up to another $17,000 in pool refill credits.

Councilman Mike Laster, long a critic of Public Works' handling of citizens high water bill complaints, cheered the proposal.

"A systematic, one-time adjustment is clearly in need," he said. "I'm grateful that the Public Works department has recognized that and is moving forward to adjust its billing authority appropriately."

Laster said he remains concerned that the city's water bill ordinance is insufficient to deal with daily anomalies that cause residents to be overcharged, historic hurricanes notwithstanding.

"They use this ordinance to really, I think, punish people unfairly, just assuming the water meters are perfect and they don't break," Laster said. "This ordinance revision is helpful, but it doesn't seem to correct that problem. They need an inherent system to acknowledge that sometimes mechanical things break."

Options on unusual bills

Under existing city ordinance, homeowners have three ways to adjust unusual bills.

If one month's bill spikes to more than double a homeowner's monthly average and neither the owner nor the city can determine why - a scenario that covers most of the accounts affected by Harvey - the owner can pay 1.5 times his monthly average and have the rest forgiven. The rule suspension before council on Wednesday, in essence, would drop that 1.5 ratio down to 1.

The other scenarios envisioned in the existing ordinance are leaks - the customer can pay what he would have paid in an average month and pay for half of all the excess water related to the leak - and "exceptional circumstances," which allow a customer to pay five times his average monthly bill and have the rest of the unusual bill, up to $4,000, forgiven.