ATLANTA — Atlanta Watershed Commissioner Mikita Browning wants the city council to extend the water bill amnesty program until January for nearly 30,000 residential customers who have millions of dollars in unpaid water and sewer bills. This would be the second extension of the program that began July 28 and was originally scheduled to end the first week of October.
Browning says the city will begin service cutoffs after Jan. 1, 2023. That is the first time the head of the Department of Watershed Management has been that clear about cutting water for customers who haven’t paid, sometimes for years. The city also knows it will probably have to write off millions of dollars that are uncollectible.
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DWM says about 1,400 customers have arranged payment plans since the amnesty, officially called FLOAT, began 11 weeks ago. We met one of those customers and her father at the library on Pryor Road in southwest Atlanta, where DWM has its amnesty roadshow this week. She didn’t want to give us her name, but when Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Richard Belcher asked her how far behind she is on her bill, she responded, “A long way during the pandemic.” She left today with a new payment plan.
Browning told the Council Utilities Committee on Sept. 27 that she wants to extend the amnesty through the end of the yea, three months longer than initially planned. “The reason for the extension is we’re getting so much success with the program, we felt the additional time would be valuable to allow more customers to get their accounts and their affairs in order.”
The city has a long way to go. On Jan. 1, 2022, unpaid bills totaled just less than $129.9 million. As of last Friday, Oct. 7, the total was $120.5 million. Single-family or multifamily accounts owe 91% of that amount. City officials are particularly sensitive about the prospect of cutting off water to apartments, where residents probably have no control over whether the owner has or has not paid the bill.
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“If you’re shutting off water, that really does mean there’s going to be displacement of families, and we do have to be very careful about that,” Browning told the council last month.
Veteran city councilmember Howard Shook recognizes ending the amnesty and turning off water for nonpayers won’t be easy, but says it has to be done. He told Channel 2′s Richard Belcher, “I think we’ve given more than adequate time to let customers know, ‘Hey, look, this period where payment is, in effect, voluntary, has to come to an end.’”
Shook also acknowledges the city will have to write off perhaps tens of millions of dollars in uncollectible bills.
“Good accounting principles hold that you need to timely — which we don’t do around here — timely write down uncollectible debt,” he said, adding that state law mandates the city cannot legally collect bills that are more than seven years old. DWM hasn’t provided the council with details of how much it will want to write off. The council will have to approve that and the extension of the amnesty program through the end of the year
Everyone involved knows COVID made the collections problem worse, but Councilmember Dustin Hillis said of the problem recently, “This is not something new.”
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