Houston to consider water billing ordinance updates as customers call for relief

Houston City Council members will discuss Dec. 6 a series of proposed changes to city ordinances that could bring relief to water customers grappling with inaccurate bills.

The changes, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said, were spurred in part by complaints residents have made to city officials and to the council about the city overcharging people for water use.

The overview

Turner said his administration worked for months with the city's legal department and its public works department on crafting the ordinance changes. The changes were assessed to determine affects on the city's financial outlook and its bond covenants, he said.

The root of the problem, Turner said, is that the city's current ordinances restrict the ability of public works officials to respond to complaints and make good on errors.

"When many of the ordinances were first enacted, they were created with the assumption that all the equipment worked properly and that we received accurate readings of customers' water use," Turner said at a Dec. 4 news conference. "Today’s reality is quite different. Today we are faced with a high number of failing meter reading devices due to the aged infrastructure, and the city must rely on a much higher number of estimated readings, much higher than any of us would like."

The ordinance changes would allow public works staff to "resolve an overwhelming majority of disputes on the first call," Turner said.

The detail

As of press time, the agenda item language had not been uploaded to the city's website, but Turner discussed the nine proposed ordinance changes at a Dec. 4 news conference.

• 1. An ordinance to remove the limit on how many times per year a customer can have their water bill adjusted following a water leak. The current ordinance allows water customers to receive two adjustments for leaks per year.
• 2. An ordinance to reduce customer bills to the average water use level if they complete their own repairs on a water leak within 30 days of receiving the bill. If a customer repairs the leak within 30-60 days, they can receive a 75% adjustment. If they complete a repair in more than 60 days, they can receive a 50% adjustment. The changes are meant to incentivize customers to make repairs to private leaks, Turner said.
• 3. An ordinance to provide customers with a 100% credit for wastewater charges when they receive an adjustment to their bills when repairing a water leak. The current ordinance provides a 50% credit.
• 4. An ordinance to change the threshold for when a customer can receive additional bill adjustments following a leak. The current ordinance allows customers to qualify for additional adjustments if the leak balance remaining is $2,000 for typical customers, or more than $250 for low-income eligible customers. The proposed ordinance would reduce the thresholds to $1,000 and $100, respectively.
• 5. When customers receive high water bills with no explanation—and no leak and no meter problems are detected—a proposed ordinance would change how far a bill can be adjusted, from 150% of average water usage down to 125% of average water usage.
• 6. For situations where a customer needs help in a way that does not fit into any other categories, a proposed ordinance would lower the threshold for how above average a bill has to be for someone to qualify for adjustments. The current ordinance requires a bill to be five times a customer's average bill to quality and provides a reduction of $4,000 for one adjustment if it doesn’t exceed a two-month timeframe. The proposed ordinance would reduce the threshold to two times the average monthly bill and allow bills to be reduced by up to $10,000 for one adjustment that doesn’t exceed two billing cycles.
• 7. In situations where a customer is paying basic service charges and they aren’t using water, a proposed ordinance would give customers the option to pay the city $150 to lock the meter and no longer be charged for basic service. The current ordinance requires a customer to pay a private plumber to cap the line and remove the meter, which Turner said can cost up to $1,500. Customers who want to reactivate a meter after locking it will not have to pay a developer impact fee, Turner said.
• 8. An ordinance to provide a benefit to customers who opt into e-bills instead of paper bills of 50 cents per bill.
• 9. An ordinance to codify a practice already being used by the public works department that restricts staff from correcting a residential customer's bill if it is more than three months old, unless the correction is in the customer's favor. The ordinance was proposed as an agenda item by City Council members Amy Peck, Carolyn Evans-Shabazz and Mary Nan Huffman.

Houston Public Works Director Carol Haddock said accuracy issues in the water bill system can often be tied to failing remote reading devices that read a water meter remotely and send the information to the city.

In 2019, the public works department was dealing with about 40,000 failing devices, which required staff to get manual reads on those water meters. The department was estimating water levels on about 6,000-7,000 accounts each month due to a lack of resources to read all of those devices.

As of 2023, the public works department is dealing with more than 125,000 failing remote devices, Haddock said, and estimates nearly 40,000 bills per month.

The city has roughly 550,000 total water accounts, Haddock said. The majority of the city's remote reading devices were put in place in the early 2000s with an expected life span of 10-15 years, she said, and the city began the process of replacing them in 2019, a process that is ongoing.

What they're saying

"The city is not in the business of trying to profit from people getting high water bills," Turner said. "We want the bills to reflect [customers'] actual usage."

What's next

If the Houston City Council votes in favor of the ordinance changes, they will go into effect immediately, Haddock said at the Dec. 4 conference. Turner said the changes should not add a significant amount of money to the city's bottom line, but did not provide an estimated financial impact to the city.

Meanwhile, Turner said the city will continue to work to replace failed meters.