Homeowner blames city for nearly $3,000 water bill

PHOENIX (AZFamily/Gray News) — A homeowner in Phoenix said he was hit with a nearly $3,000 water bill after a city-owned transmitter failed to report his water usage for seven months. He believes the city should be held responsible.

Cameron Green said he opened his water bill last month to find a charge he thought couldn’t be real.

“I think my stomach got sick. I’m thinking this can’t be real. There’s no way,” Green said.

The bill totaled $2,777 and reflected 344,000 gallons of water that the city said Green and his wife used over seven months.

“We don’t have a pool; we don’t have a jacuzzi. We only have one bathroom and bathtub that we rarely use,” Green said.

Green said he contacted the city of Phoenix for an explanation. City officials told him a transmitter used to report monthly water consumption had not been functioning, leaving the city unable to bill him during that period.

Once the device was repaired, Green was back-billed for the full seven months. Green said the city did not acknowledge responsibility for the equipment failure.

“Where my problem is, they did not take responsibility for the broken transmitter that connected the bill, which prevented us from having information to solve the problem sooner, and they take no responsibility and make no adjustments for it,” Green said.

Green said an underground leak in front of his home, not visible from the surface, contributed to the high water usage. He said if the city’s transmitter had been working, he could have identified and repaired the leak sooner, preventing the loss of hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and reducing the bill significantly.

Green posted about his experience on the social media platform Nextdoor and said he received a flood of responses from other users who reported similar sudden spikes in their water bills.

Arizona’s Family reached out to the City of Phoenix Water Services Department, which provided a statement saying intermittent failures of its encoder receiver transmitters are unusual but can occur.

“Monthly reads indicating zero consumption are routinely checked ... but zero consumption doesn’t always mean zero water use,” the statement also said.

City officials said these factors may explain the delay in identifying and resolving the problem.

Green said he has worked out a plan with the city to pay the bill over the next 36 months. He said he believes the situation could have been prevented with a better system for detecting equipment failures.

“I understand things break. I understand my responsibility. But the city has a responsibility,” Green said. “If they are going to bill you, they can’t make some error in a way that is very prolonged and you bear responsibility for something that could have been solved six or seven months ago.”