Columbia water customers owe millions in past-due bills. Could that affect your rates?
During the first year of the pandemic in 2020, the city of Columbia kept the water on for residents who couldn’t afford to pay their bills.
It was an effort to “be as reasonable and compassionate as possible,” Assistant City Manager Clint Shealy said. But now, the city faces nearly $18 million in unpaid water bills.
In February 2021, the city resumed what it calls “disconnects” for customers who were more than a month behind on payments – the idea being that once someone has their water cut, they’re going to make a payment to get that water service restored, Shealy said.
At the time, customers owed roughly $14 million in past-due bills.
It’s now been just over a year since those disconnects resumed, but the debt owed by water customers has only grown, nearing $18 million by the end of January, according to city data.
Before the pandemic, the city carried an average of between $3 and $5 million in unpaid water bills, Shealy said.
Shealy said it’s crucial that the city recovers at least a portion of the $17.7 million now owed. If it doesn’t, the city could have to offer less competitive salaries and end up with fewer resources to finish maintenance projects. It could even mean eventual customer rate increases, though Shealy said for now day-to-day operations haven’t been affected.
After a year of disconnecting service, the problem has only gotten worse. Part of the reason is simply because the time it takes to process a high volume of unpaid bills.
“When you accumulate a years’ worth of disconnects, you can’t cut them all off in a day, a week or a month,” Shealy said.
Additionally, shutting off the water isn’t going to solve the problem for a household that doesn’t have the money to pay the entire amount they owe, especially when they’re several months behind. In those cases, a household could get stuck in a cycle where the water is cut off, the customer pays a little but falls behind again in another month or so, and then the cycle starts again.
Annette Tucker, director of Wateree Community Action Partnership — an anti-poverty agency that’s been providing assistance to low-income residents since the 1970s — said she’s seen that cycle play out firsthand.
The organization she leads offers a variety of assistance programs, including a program for low-income residents who need help paying their household water bills. (Households making no more than 150% of the federal poverty level per month qualify for the assistance. That equates to a monthly income of $3,312 for a four-person home. )
That program, paid for with federal pandemic relief dollars, has assisted nearly 600 households, Tucker said, with an average of $613 going to applicants. Tucker said some households have needed to apply for assistance multiple times since the program launched in October, either because of high water usage or being several months behind on their bills.
She anticipates March will be a busy month for the water assistance program as more disconnects get processed. Tucker added the city has been “very lenient” and is helping connect residents with hers and other organizations that offer such assistance.
Residents can apply for the water assistance program online, or by filling out a paper application at any of the Community Action Partnership’s physical locations. The program expires in September 2023.
Between Jan. 16 and Feb. 11, 1,247 water accounts were disconnected and another 415 disconnect orders were being processed, according to data shared by Columbia water spokesperson Robert Yanity.
The water department could not provide a total number of accounts that had been disconnected since the city resumed that practice. There is a constant revolving door of accounts being disconnected and reconnected, Yanity said, “thus, providing a cumulative number of disconnects over a time period would not only be difficult, but would not provide an accurate picture.”
At the same time the city is disconnecting water accounts for non-payment, water leaking from broken city pipes is going to waste while the city works to keep pace with infrastructure repairs.
At the end of January, between 75 and 100 main water lines needed repairs, and another 200 service lines were broken city-wide. Data for February was not immediately available.
Shealy couldn’t quantify the value of water lost from broken pipes, but said it’s minor compared to the value of unpaid water bills. He added that water service relies both on crews being able to maintain the system and households paying for the services.
“If any part of that chain breaks down, that’s problematic,” Shealy said.
