It Pays to Pay Attention

I receive my utility bill from the City of Prescott during the second week of the month with payment usually due around the 20^th of the month. The bill includes charges for the water I’ve used, a charge for sanitation/trash pickup, a charge for the sewer, a fee for street lights (although in the community where I live, we have no street lights because of a ‘dark sky’ policy), and some other fees and taxes. The bill also shows how much water I’ve used over the x number of days covered by the bill as well as the number of gallons used to calculate my sewer charge.

Most of the time, when I receive my bill, I just casually browse through the bill, mostly just checking to see how much water I’ve used relative to the previous month and the overall amount charged for these city services. The bill includes a bar graph showing my monthly water useage for the current year along with the previous year's monthly useage for comparison.

Recently, however, I was prompted to take a closer look at my bills because of a conversation I had with one of my friends about the various charges on our bills. I created an MS Excel spreadsheet summarizing my monthly utility bills going back as far as the calendar year 2020.

Reviewing the data in the spreadsheet, I didn’t notice anything unusual until I came to the data for the most recent three months of my bills; that is, for the months of April, May, and June of this year, 2023. Then, something unusual caught my attention. I noticed that the number of gallons used to calculate my sewer charges for all three months (1390 for the three months in question) were exactly the same.

So, why should this have caught my attention? Well, I knew that to determine the sewer charge, the city uses the average water consumption for the six winter months (November through April) of the previous and current years to determine the sewer charges for the next 12 months. While it certainly is possible that my average water consumption for the winter months could be exactly the same for two years in a row, I also thought that it would be highly unlikely that that would be true. So, I decided to take a closer look at the data.

You can see an example calculation of how the average water usage for the six winter months is determined by clicking here. When I did the calculations for my water bills, I found that the number that should have been used to determine my sewer charges for May and June should have been 950 instead of the 1390 shown on my bill. That is, while my April bill was correct in showing and using 1390 gallons for my sewer charge, the May and June bills should have used only 950 gallons to determine my sewer charge. In short, it looked like I was being charged too much for my sewer usage for May and June.

So, I called the city’s billing department and explained to the customer service rep what I had noted about the April/May/June bills. She looked up my account records, did a quick calculation, and agreed that, yes, it did look like my calculation was correct and that the bill was in error. She said that she would check further and get back to me. After waiting a couple of days and not hearing back from the city, I decided to go to the city's billing department at City Hall and find out what they had determined. Sure enough, they agreed with my calculations and gave me a credit on my next bill that would have been equivalent to a savings of more than eighty dollars for this year's utility bills. Well worth the effort!

I think I will look a bit more carefully and critically at my city utility bills from now on.