Oct. 14--In the first answer to a scandal involving water meter inaccuracy and overcharging, a consultant hired by Tinley Park acknowledged problems with the meters but downplayed the significance -- sparking immediate criticism of the consultants' methods and conclusions as the village faces what could be a costly lawsuit.
The 18-page presentation was portrayed by village administrators as confirmation that the problems are not widespread. But Village Manager Dave Niemeyer acknowledged that the village, even after the report, doesn't know the extent of the problems and is unwilling to immediately do random sampling to figure out the extent as recommended by the consultants. An originally planned second-phase investigation to study the issue more deeply has been paused because of a pending lawsuit.
"Believe me, there's no one who wants to put this behind us more than us, but certainly the litigation obviously complicates it and is drawing out the process," Niemeyer said.
Niemeyer touted the consultants as experts who did solid work, but the Tribune found they used looser standards for meter accuracy than ones a top national expert said should have been used. And several residents who've complained about the meters said they suspect the findings were skewed to protect the village's reputation at the expense of finding the truth.
"This (report) seems like a propaganda piece for the village of Tinley Park," said Donna Gerlich, whom the village previously acknowledged had a meter that overcharged her and her husband.
Another resident whose meter was confirmed to have problems, Angela Kaczmarski, said the report "seems biased toward keeping the village guilt-free."
The consultants, Chicago-based West Monroe Partners, said Tuesday they could not immediately comment and directed questions to the village. Niemeyer defended the review, which cost about $124,000, as an "honest assessment."
The West Monroe report comes four months after a Tribune investigation found village officials knew for years their smart electronic water meters were regularly overstating how much water was going through them, yet did little to ferret out bad meters and ensure residents affected were fully refunded. Instead of alerting the public, officials initially downplayed the problem by falsely telling residents far fewer meters had overbilled residents than they had found and that all tested meters had passed industry standards, when they hadn't.
The scandal led to the ouster of the village's public works director and spurred a lawsuit that accused officials of "unfair, immoral, unjust, oppressive and unscrupulous" conduct. The plaintiff is trying to get court approval to include all Tinley Park water users as plaintiffs, which could make it a high-profile, and costly, class-action lawsuit.
The controversy occurred amid a political sea change in Tinley Park, where a longtime mayor resigned, and several of his allies on the village board lost re-election bids to rivals. The new mayor, Dave Seaman, has led village officials in vowing an open and honest review of so-called "spinning" meters. Spinning is when the readings on a water meter rise higher and faster than they should.
The review released this week raised questions among residents and an industry expert.
The consultants concluded most smart meters "appear" to be within national standards, citing a summertime test that they said found 84 percent of those tested meters passed national standards.
But missing were specifics of how the other 16 percent failed. Meters can fail for overcharging and undercharging. A Tribune analysis found most of those meters overcharged. And that was based on the consultants using a "weighted" formula that allowed meters to fail some flow tests but pass overall. In one case, a meter failed one flow test by overcharging more than 8 percent, yet under the "weighted" formula was still considered accurate.
Tom Kelly, a Maryland water official who heads the industry's national committee on meter standards, told the Tribune on Tuesday that the national standards call for a stricter metric: failing a meter that overcharged at any flow test. Using that metric, the Tribune found more than 22 percent of the tested meters would have flunked, compared with just 9 percent flunked for overcharging under the consultants' standard.
Kelly said even a 9 percent failure rate is bad, but a 22 percent failure rate is "completely unacceptable."
"If the customers got ahold of that (statistic) ... they're going to scream, and rightfully so. Fair is fair," Kelly said.
Niemeyer said he was confident in the consultants' work and, regardless, discounted the high failure rate as being tied to a sample that included many meters pulled for suspicions of overbilling.
He said a better measure would be random sampling of village meters -- something long called for in national standards, and also recommended by West Monroe's report. But Niemeyer said the village hasn't decided whether to do that because of concern of how it might interfere with the village's defense of itself in the lawsuit.
The consultants also suggested the village had over-counted how many meters had spun, but didn't offer any data on how many meters they thought had spun, or were spinning.
The Tribune previously reported that the village noted at least 355 cases over the years of spinning meters, and that doesn't count thousands more entries of failures that lacked specifics on how the meters failed.
But the consultants said they "rarely observed" a meter spinning, and the spinning they saw was only when meters didn't have water going through them, and when water was put through them those meters actually under-billed. Village officials said the consultants suspected that workers sometimes misdiagnosed meters as spinning.
Also at issue is exactly how meters can spin. Assistant Manager Steve Tilton said the consultants believed the only way is by a meter spinning consistently in ways that always boost consumption readings without going back down. But one national expert has told the Tribune it's possible the meters spin intermittently too, based on records the Tribune provided him of meters with up-and-down consumption levels that passed some accuracy tests before later testing as spinners.
The consultants also questioned whether spinning meters actually lead to overcharges. The consultants said they separately reviewed 10 accounts of residents with suspicious meters and found "no direct correlation" between spinning and the amount of water on the customer's bills.
It's unclear which accounts the consultants were reviewing to find no correlation of spinning to higher-billed amounts. Niemeyer and Tilton said they didn't know, nor could they immediately provide records. And it's the finding that most frustrates residents previously profiled by the Tribune. At Gerlich's townhouse, she and her husband had consumption levels hover about 8,000 gallons per billing period until it began creeping up over five years until it hit 29,000 gallons in early 2011, when the Gerlichs complained. The village found the meter spinning and replaced it. Once the meter was replaced, the couple's recorded consumption returned to about 8,000 gallons.
"It's not like all of a sudden we were taking 10 showers a day. There's only two people in the house," she said. "Reading that report, it just infuriates me because it's just like they're saying 'Oh no, everything's fine. It's just your imagination.' "
Other residents, such as Laura Konieczny, criticized the report. The village replaced her meter after she complained it was overbilling her. She said the report seems skewed toward protecting the village.
The report offered no explanation of the cases cited by the Tribune. Instead, the report focused on how, in general, water bills were far higher because of rate increases imposed by the city of Chicago that have been passed on to residents, even as consumption rates, on average, have dropped. It said that, in general, the 93 homes that had smart meters replaced last fall didn't have any less reported consumption than homes without smart meter replacement. It even credited the village's smart meters for giving the village "more accurate metering," although the consultants chided "less than comprehensive management" over billing that "placed the burden of proof on the customer to address issues."
A big issue left unresolved is what additional refunds, if any, affected residents should get. The Tribune, in reviewing accounts, found affected residents repeatedly appeared to have been short-changed. The Gerlichs, for example, had their bills cut by $109 but could be owed $317 more, under a Tribune analysis.
The report offered no specific plan for refunds. Instead, it questioned the village's unclear refund policy while also telling the village that it should use its random sampling and engineering analyses of spinning meters to gauge how much meters spin, which can inform how much people should be refunded.
Among other recommendations, it suggested monthly billing, instead of quarterly, to better manage the system. And "to begin rebuilding trust with the community and utility stakeholders," it suggested an "aggressive communication campaign" that included, among other things, a focus group of residents "to assist with marketing and testing of system changes."
jmahr@tribpub.com
gpratt@tribpub.com
