Scott Organizing On High Water Bill Issue at May 18th Water Board Meeting

After two April Water Board meetings were cancelled, Board of Assessment Appeals member Candyce Scott is again organizing people to advocate for those with unusually high water bills.

“The fight for action on unfair water billing practices in New Britain continues!” said Scott.

“The Board of Water Commissioners has canceled numerous public meetings over the past few weeks,” Scott added, “because they don’t want to answer hard questions from their constituents about our neighbors being targeted by absurdly high water bills.”

Scott had organized people to attend the regular April meeting of the Board of Water Commissioners on April 20th, but that meeting was postponed. Scott organized people to attend the rescheduled meeting date on April 27th, but that, too, was cancelled shortly before the meeting.

“We responded by turning out to a Common Council meeting last month to speak with our elected officials directly about this issue,” said Scott.

But, she said, “Nothing has been done yet, so we will be going to next week’s Board of Water Commissioners meeting on Wednesday, May 18th at 6:30 PM, at 50 Caretaker Road.”

“Let’s support our neighbors as they demand transparency and fairness!” she 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.”