Agenda Item: 7(a)
Prepared By: Jeffrey E. Poteet, General Manager, Water & Sewer
Business: Consent Agenda Item
Department: Water & Sewer
Subject:
Title
Approval of a Water and Sewer Billing Refund - Marco Island Senior Living, LLC in the amount of $112,742.33 - Jeffrey E. Poteet, General Manager, Water & Sewer Department.
Body
BACKGROUND:
Marco Island Senior Living, LLC (Account No. 50705), located at 1170 San Marco Road, contacted the City regarding concerns with its utility billing. The Water and Sewer Department's Customer Service staff conducted a comprehensive review of the account, including historical billing records, meter configuration settings, applicable utility rates, and account setup.
The investigation determined that one of the customer's commercial water meters had been incorrectly configured in the utility billing system when it was installed in July 2024. Commercial and large-diameter water meters commonly use meter multipliers because their registers record water usage in larger increments rather than displaying the total gallons that pass through the meter. The utility billing software applies the assigned multiplier to convert the meter register reading into actual water consumption for billing purposes. In this case, the meter multiplier was inadvertently entered as 1,000 instead of the correct value of 100, causing the water consumption recorded by that meter to be overstated by a factor of ten. In addition, the associated water and sewer base charges for that meter were not established correctly when the account was configured. As a result, both the monthly base charges and the water and sewer usage charges were calculated incorrectly over an extended period.
Customer Service staff recalculated each affected billing period using the correct meter multiplier, applicable utility rates, and the proper base charges. A detailed reconciliation was prepared comparing the amounts billed to the amounts that should have been billed. Based...
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