How we got here
As part of Mayor John Whitmire’s Water Improvement Plan, Houston Public Works began replacing broken remote-read devices that were causing inaccurate water bills for Houston residents earlier this year.
Diving in deeper
The new remote readers were installed to residential and commercial customers, with nearly 100,000 of those installations done at single-residential households, Macchi said.
“We’ve been able to go through and make a five-year plan, and condense it into a few months and get it done really quickly,” Macchi said.
The replacement and installations of these readers required a temporary charge to single-family residential customers as a fixed set monthly amount. Macchi said the department is working on communicating with residents to transition them back to their actual usage bill and verifying the accuracy of the readings.
“Roughly 50,000 people have already transitioned and have been back on actual usage,” Macchi said. “There’s 75,000 right now that are still on set, [and] 30,000 in the next 60 days will transition back to actual usage.
Looking ahead
Macchi noted that there is still a total of 437,000 water meters across the city of Houston, with 273,000 devices in the ground that will need to be replaced. Erin Jones, the Houston Public Works spokesperson, said the department will address those in the future.
“The next 273,000 in the future, which are customers who have working devices, will need a replacement at some point soon," Macchi said. "Many of them have devices that are older technology, they don’t provide the advanced metrics, the advanced alert systems that the customers that have received the new devices have. They are going to need to be upgraded."
Council members commended Macchi and the public works department on the installations, and how they worked diligently on a problem that has plagued the city for years. Abbie Kamin, District C, said she has seen a decrease in water bill complaints and applauded the department for ramping up the installations.
“During the pandemic, we had huge equipment issues, we could not get the equipment that we needed to install a lot of these,” Kamin said. “To see it ramp up, so expeditiously, it’s tremendous.”
