Dec. 25--Donna Gerlich recalls the unusual meeting to which she was summoned by officials in her village last month.
Gerlich had been featured in a Tribune investigation of Tinley Park's faulty water meters that led to overcharging. The village had previously determined her and her husband's meter was recording more water than the couple was using and gave them a small refund and replaced the meter. With her new meter reporting far less usage than her old, the Tribune found she could be owed hundreds of dollars more, and Gerlich asked the village to pay up.
But at that meeting, instead of agreeing the Gerlichs' old meter gouged them more than the village previously acknowledged, Tinley officials suggested the new meter -- the one now showing consistent lower readings -- could be under-recording water use. So officials installed a third meter, which is also reporting far lower usage than the original.
Donna Gerlich, who lives in a modest townhouse with her husband, Carl, said she is losing her patience.
"They've proven my point," Gerlich said, "so refund my money and let's move on."
The Tribune investigation, published in June, found the suburb knew for years that some meters led to overbilling of residents yet it gave the public assurances the meters worked fine. Along the way, Tinley Park officials repeatedly under-refunded residents whose meters had led to overcharging, while relying on testing protocols that downplayed the extent of the failures.
Nearly seven months later, the village has generally tried to reassure residents it's committed to fixing problems, announced a proposal to replace all of the town's nearly 20,000 suspect meters, while at times describing meter problems as minor and not widespread. Instead of coming up with a plan to review all suspect meters, the village has dealt with complaints on essentially a case-by-case basis.
The village this summer ousted its public works director over his handling of the issue while hiring a consultant it said would help determine the scope of the problem and how to address it. But that hiring was overshadowed by a lawsuit that, using the Tribune's findings, alleged village officials' actions were "unfair, immoral, unjust, oppressive and unscrupulous." The lawyers are seeking class-action status, which could lead to a costly settlement.
The consultants' effort, instead of including random test sampling of meters, recommended the village do it. The village has said it won't for now, due to the lawsuit.
But even without those test results, the consultants suggested the problem isn't that bad, and even theorized that maybe village workers had been wrong in labeling many of the meters as over-recording water flow. The Tribune found 355 cases of meters the village diagnosed as spinning since 2007, a figure that does not include thousands more meter failures identified in village documents that lack details on how they broke.
