In August 2021, Elizabeth Taylor-Mead checked her bank statement and discovered that a few thousand dollars had been withdrawn by the City of Philadelphia. Her monthly water bill had suddenly jumped from $45 to nearly $3,500.
“Mine was pretty horrific. It was over $13,000,” Chelsea Burns, of Point Breeze, said recently. But, Burns said, PWD did a good job identifying the problem and fixing it: “They were pretty quick and true to their word.”Month after month, she’d receive auto-generated letters saying that unnamed city officials had been “unable to resolve your inquiry,” and more time would be required to investigate.“It’s like the Wizard of Oz, with people behind the curtain,” she recalled.
“I think these bureaucracies rely on the fact that if they just gaslight you long enough, at some point you think, ‘The hell with it.’ and just pay,” Taylor-Mead said. “But they picked on the wrong little old Sicilian lady.”for a hearing before the Tax Review Board. There was no board. It was two officials on a screen. She hadn’t been informed the hearing was remote.
It sounded like she had won. But after a month with no word, she reached out to the city’s Office of Administrative Review. A staffer wrote back that the case manager responsible for processing her decision letter “is no longer with the office” and had “left all his work unfinished.”The ordeal behind her, Taylor-Mead is in the process of selling the home.
Rademaekers said 93% of accounts are currently billed based on actual readings. The meter upgrades, which began in 2019 and are expected to be completed by May 2025, should further reduce the number of estimated bills. David Denenberg, an attorney who represented Jackson in her appeal, said PWD could do a better job explaining the customer’s responsibility to notify the utility if their meter is not properly transmitting data.
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