Seattle water company to pay its overbilling fines with a surcharge on water bills

A court ordered the Seattle municipal water company to pay compensation to its customers for "fire hydrant" surcharges added to their bills (fire hydrants are a municipal responsibility and shouldn't be charged to general water customers). In order to pay the fines, the company is adding a "we have to pay you compensation" surcharge to its bills.

As a result of the latest court decision, anyone who was a Seattle Public Utilities water customer between March 2002 and December 2004 is due a refund under a court order issued in October. But current water customers will be the ones paying the bill.
Eligible water customers will get their full rebate in May or June. The surcharge and tax will be spread over 21 months.

City to OK water-bill surcharge

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

altgrave

i wasn’t suggesting 100%, but suing probably would be faster.
rpl

lols. i see this happen in Australia as well. Welcome to advanced capitalism peeps.

Not that we don’t love ourselves some anti-capitalism ranting around here, but are you sure it’s entirely fair to lay this problem at the feet of “capitalism” when the water company is owned and operated by the city government?
js7a

Utility fees are regressive. The essentials of life should be paid by a two-bracket income tax like they have in Sweden: the bottom bracket is 0%, and the top bracket is 57%, and the cusp is 10% above the median wage.
igxqrrl

Why is this a surprise? Where else would the money come from?

I guess it would be better if they just incorporated the surcharge into the base rate without explicitly spelling out that it’s a surcharge?
zuzu

Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
musicman

lols. i see this happen in Australia as well. Welcome to advanced capitalism peeps.
altgrave

furthermore, the administrators of the utility are paid MONEY, which should be taken away from them, in perpetuity (no matter if they move jobs or take unemployment), UNTIL THE DEFICIT IS RESTORED, because they are responsible for lying. it is neither “magic” nor particularly difficult to conceive, except in our retarded system, rife with people clamouring to make excuses for con artists. GAH!
dculberson

But only capitalism uses money! Right?!?
Timothy Hutton

BEEDIE said:

Surely they could have cut that 0.5% somewhere rather than sticking it to the customer/citizens.

it would have been a $22M cut no matter where in the city budget they cut it, and it also would have impacted the citizens of the City just the same. Should some other arm of the city budget suffer for the errors of the Water company?

GILBERT WHAM suggested:

Um, the shareholder’s dividend

The shareholders of the Municipal Water Company are the citizens of the city. Were you thinking “Bond Owners” – take money from them, and the cost of borrowing money for the Water company (at least, if not the city of Seattle) rises very quickly, again, impacting the citizens of city far beyond $22M they owe the customers.

Again, there is no magical source of money – the only monaey the city has comes from the citizens, the only money the water company has if from the city or the customers. All the money in this situation comes from the same people.
Cupcake Faerie

As a former longtime Seattle resident, somehow this does surprise me. I don’t think the people of Seattle will go for it though…On the other hand, when the Mariners wanted a new baseball stadium – the people of Seattle paid for it – in spite of the fact they voted it down. The city (aka taxpayers) paid for it in the end. I guess the people of Seattle, like all people versus the governments they put in place, continue to get it in the end.
Timothy Hutton

ALTGRAVE: I’m not “clamouring to make excuses for con artists,” I’m giving in to the inevitable nature of the polical beast called “Municipal Water Company”. I think you maybe on to something though… Rather than garnish/seize wages, if the officers can be found personally liable, you could sue them and attempt to collect from their insurance or personal assets…
FoetusNail

So, will the customers receiving refunds be exempt from the surcharge, or will there be another court decision and another surcharge to refund the customers receiving this refund the surcharges they paid providing revenue for their own refunds.
Gilbert Wham

CICADA said:

Come on– where’d anyone think the money was going to have to come from, anyhow

Um, the shareholder’s dividend?
altgrave

why NOT garnish wages, though, for, at very least, gross neglect, if not criminal malfeasance? and how difficult is it to find out who was in charge, when people are being given a refund specifically geared to a period wherein that policy was in effect (to say nothing of the new policy)?
Anonymous

@#4 JS7A That’s not how America has ever worked. If you like the system in Sweden so much why not move there? Why change America? Some of us like here the way it is.
dainel

The fine is going to come from the surcharge, but the cost of the hydrants are coming from the general fund. Correct?
Anonymous

If you started conserving energy too much, Toronto Hydro added a “Lost Revenue Adjustment Charge” (now discontinued) to customers’ bills, and on the SAME BILL, they had the “Shared Savings Charge”, which was an “incentive” to the electricity reseller to pursue energy reduction initiatives.
Timothy Hutton

ALTGRAVE: Garnish wages if you like, but I don’t think courts wil allow 100% garnishment (I don’t know, it just seems like they’d be reluctant to tell someone to work for NO pay), and I think raising $22 Million via garnishment would take too long. Suing them directly (based on established personal responsibility) should allow you go after their house, personal liability insurance, etc. You would likely get to $22 Million faster by seizing assets than by drawing down their pay check.

We agree, I’m simply providing a faster route to payment.
semiotix

Excellent! Smithers, put that water company on the Christmas card list.
Beedie

Timothy Hutton said,

“it would have been a $22M cut no matter where in the city budget they cut it, and it also would have impacted the citizens of the City just the same.”

That assumes that the city’s spending is already as efficient as possible, and that every dollar directly benefits the citizens in some way. Based on how every other city/state/federal government operates, I highly doubt it.
noah

Um, the shareholder’s dividend?

It’s a department of the city government, not a publicly owned corporation. There are no “shareholders”. It’s not even a for-profit organization.
Beedie

22 million dollars is one half of one percent of Seattle’s $3.9B 2009 city budget. Surely they could have cut that 0.5% somewhere rather than sticking it to the customer/citizens.
The Unusual Suspect

Similar things happen in Ontario.

A local hydroelectric raised rates to be “green” by convincing customers to conserve electricity. It worked, consumption dropped, and the utility then raised rates again to make up for the shortfall in their profits.
Cicada

Yes, it would be far better to cut salaries and benefits to their workers instead of raising rates.
Come on– where’d anyone think the money was going to have to come from, anyhow– the customers .
altgrave

until this very post, i persisted in my belief that being an accountant was boring!
ivan256

Let this be a lesson to those trying to hit the legal-settlement lottery jackpot.
altgrave

more to the point, people (are getting/got) paid for having made this error; they should be the ones paying for it. it’s perfectly simple, apologists.
Roger Stanton

Gee, couldn’t they just call the US Treasury and have them print up $22 million in small bills?
Timothy Hutton

CICADA said:

Come on– where’d anyone think the money was going to have to come from, anyhow– the customers.

Exactly – The Water Company (likely) doesn’t have a secret pile of cash that it can pull the fime monies from, every dime the water company has either comes from the customers or from the government, there is no where else for this moey to come from.

I applaud the reporter(s) that reported the story this way, it point out the reality of what it means to “stick it to those greedy bastards at the water company.”

SHould they sue, yes – but not for refunds (unless the overpayment was excessive), they should have just gotten the errors corrected, and possibly credits towards future bills, but that increases the burdens on everyone else, so…
igpajo

Like cupcake faerie said this doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. I live in the Seattle area and this city’s politics have gotten to the point that this kind of sleaziness is basically expected anymore. Seattle and King County politics, hell, Washington State Politics, is so fucked up right now. Has been for years. We’re one of the highest taxed regions in the county. But the people just keep voting them in to office, so it must be what the people want.
Anonymous

the water company stole money from it’s customers, and is now forcing their customers to pay for the court ordered refund of the stolen money.

you have to figure that a percentage of the people who were stolen from won’t know about or ask for a refund.

in the end the water company turns a crime into a money making strategy. i’d bet they are planning on how to do this or something similar again.

the fact that they didn’t just raise their rates and added this extra surcharge is just a big ‘fuck you’ to thier customers. it says: yea we got caught, but we’re keeping the money, and we’re going to show you how we are going to keep the money, not a dam thing you can do about it, not like you have a choice anyway. pay up bitches!
i bet they pad the surcharge so they make even more money on charging ppl for money they already stole :D
ScottTFrazer

water companies’ billing practices always amazed me anyway.

When the small town I lived in experienced a drought, the water company implored us to cut consumption. When we cut usage by almost 50% they jacked the rates 100% because they bill based on usage even though their operating costs are fixed.

So what you’ve got is a law firm that sued to get a rebate for a few folks, and that rebate will be paid for by taxes and/or a rate hike in the future, all while leaving the original expenditure (hydrants) unpaid.

Who sees the only winner here?
justinmm2

“(fire hydrants are a municipal responsibility and shouldn’t be charged to general water customers).”

So it should come out of their paychecks as state/local taxes, instead of appearing on their water bill?

Seems they’re going to be paying for the fire hydrants, one way or the other…