Scott Organizing To Bring High Water Bill Issue To Water Board

Editor’s note (4/26/2022): Candyce Scott has said that the Board of Water Commissioners meeting for April 27, 2022 has been postponed. Scott says that she encouraging people to speak about the issue at the April 27, 2022 7:00pm City Council meeting.

Board of Assessment Appeals member Candyce Scott is organizing people to advocate for those with unusually high water bills at the upcoming meeting of the Board of Water Commissioners.

The Board of Water Commissioners meeting is to be held on April 27, 2022. at 6:30pm. The Board meets at its offices, located at 50 Caretaker Road.

“As many of you know,” Scott says, “some of our neighbors have been saddled with inexplicably large water bills as high as $70,000.” Scott added that, “In February, Ald. Aram Ayalon petitioned ‘for detailed information as to how residents are notified of outstanding water bills,’ but Council has yet to act.”

“Join me and some of the other affected residents for a meeting on this issue,” Scott says. “At this meeting, we will take action and stand solidarity with residents who have high water bills.”

“We especially encourage you to come if you have a personal story related to this issue!” Scott added.

Scott and others have been concerned about cases in which residents may receive very high household water bills, possibly caused by water leaks that may have remained unknown to the residents of the homes for months.

Scott, saying she had never incurred high bills previously at her Lawlor Street home, acted on the issue when she received a $5,000 water bill, herself. Scott told the New Britain Progressive in January that she contacted the city about this, and a city water employee inspected the water meter and fixtures in her home and found no leaks.

Other residents have questioned the fairness, even in cases where a leak is found, of extraordinary high water bills in cases in which a city resident may not have been aware of or at fault for the leak.

While some have said that they have experienced an unwillingness from the city to show flexibility in those cases, the city appears to have had a history of far more tolerance for leaks in its own pipes. When the state Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) rebuked Republican Mayor Erin Stewart’s proposal to allow strip-mining of New Britain’s protected drinking watershed land, one of the CEQ’s 2018 findings was that New Britain had, “an increasingly leak-prone water distribution system,” and the CEQ said, again in 2018, said that, “New Britain’s loss of potable water during transmission is about 25% higher than the norm.”

New Britain’s water system which has considerable watershed assets in the region for itself and other towns, will require new investments and “preventive maintenance”, according to Water Department Director Ray Esponda, who told the Hartford Courant in 2018 when he was appointed to be the director that New Britain’s water infrastructure, “requires maintenance and care, and eventually we have to replace some of those 150-year-old pipes and 1920s pump stations.”

The April Board of Water Commissioners meeting had been planned for April 20th, but was re-scheduled to April 27th.