Richmond Hill resident gets shocking water bill due to misplaced decimal point

Yorkregion.com
September 27, 2018
Sheila Wang

Norm Lightbound knew something was wrong when he received an over $1,000 water bill last month, 10 times higher than usual.

On Aug. 16, Lightbound received his water bill from the Town of Richmond Hill as usual, which stated the Lightbounds used 202,500 litres of water within 98 days -- enough water to fill a large in-ground swimming pool. 

Lightbound doesn’t own a swimming pool. Neither did he believe he and his wife -- the only two occupants of the house -- could ever use that amount of water.
“I knew it was wrong. There was no way. Anyone with any common sense would know that was wrong,” Lightbound said. 

It wasn’t until three weeks later that Lightbound found out that Richmond Hill’s revenue services miscalculated his water usage due to a manual error.

The Revenue Section of Financial Services administers water billing in Richmond Hill.
“They had an incorrect multiplier on it,” Lightbound recalled what the town told him. The multiplier misplaced a decimal point by 10 times, which led to the jump in his water bill.

The revenue services has since cancelled the wrong bill and issued a new one.

However, what Lightbound couldn’t get past is the fact that it took multiple phone calls and one visit to the town hall to correct such an apparent mistake, which the town should have caught in the first place.

In the water bill, the Lightbounds were charged $911.56 for 202,000 litres of water use for May. 9-Aug. 15.

The same bill showed the family used only 21,000 litres of water in the previous billing cycle, resulting in a charge of $104.28, which they have since paid off.
It was a clear jump in water use -- an eightfold increase -- from the previous billing cycle.
Dumbfounded by the expensive bill, Alison Lightbound called the revenue services the day she received the bill only to be told to check the house for leaks.

The couple did a thorough examination, but there were no leaks.

“We shut off all of the toilets one at a time to see which one or anywhere is using water. We did all kinds of things to check it out,” Lightbound said.

Lightbound said they contacted the services again, who insisted on suspecting leaks in the house.

As the Lightbounds were puzzled and worried about paying the bill, a notice from Richmond Hill’s revenue services came to them on Sept. 11, offering a payment plan for the outstanding balance on their account.

It allowed the Lightbounds to pay the bill over an eight-month instalment plan from Sept. 11 to Apr. 11.

“This is crazy. How could they do this?” Lightbound’s wife asked.

The notice from the town, Richmond Hill spokesperson Libbi Hood said, is part of the town’s "early warning system," which alerts residents when they notice unusual metre reading.

“People do get the bill, unfortunately, 10 times they usually use and that is legitimate. In this case, absolutely it is our error. But the majority of the time, it is, in fact, a water issue,” Hood said, noting examples such as malfunctioning appliances, broken sprinkler systems and running toilets.

She said that it is up to the residents to contact the town to discuss the matter after receiving the "alert."

Lightbound decided to go the revenue services in person on Sept 12. as a last resort to figure out what the real cause of the spike in water use was.

To his dismay, the first response he received from the staff was a suggestion to change to a new metre at his own expense, which would cost Lightbound roughly another $200.
He said the staff suspected that a faulty metre might have caused the unusual reading on Lightbound’s water use, because the bill is the first one issued since the town replaced Lightbound’s water metre in June.

As Lightbound considered changing his metre, another staff stepped in and offered to take a look at the bill, who then pointed out the manual error.

“When we were being so insistent that wasn’t a leak, how could you keep on insisting that was a leak? And this guy even had me down ready to change the bloody metre rather than all being trained enough to look at some multiplier,” Lightbound said.

An updated bill was mailed to Lightbound the next day, which stated they actually used 23,400 litres of water, costing $121.46.

The bill includes two periods: May. 9-Jun. 1 (before the new metre was installed), and Jun. 1-Aug. 15 (when the new metre is in place.) It has corrected the water use for the second period from 199,000 litres to the actual 19,900 litres. 

The spokesperson said it was a manual data entry error when the town set up the account with Lightbound's new water metre. Some manual work remains despite the highly automated metre reading process in Richmond Hill.

"Richmond Hill issues more than 200,000 water bills every year. Manual errors can happen, and this type of error has occurred once or twice in the past several years. To address this issue, Richmond Hill is working with the software vendor to remove the chance of this type of error,” said an statement issued by the town on Sept. 19.

“My fear is that with all these meters they’ve changed, and this must’ve been some manual mistake in the bill, how many people in Richmond Hill are putting up with it?”
First approved by council in October 2012, Richmond Hill's  water metre replacement program started in August 2013, and is expected to be complete in December 2019.