To date, Georgetown said, 3,000 to 4,500 residential customers are still classified as “unmetered.”
This is because their meters were failures and CUC still bills them under a flat rate tariff, Georgetown stated.
In their testimony to CPUC, Georgetown’s Jamshed K. Madan and Larry R. Gawlik, said CUC does not appear to have appropriate near-term solution to the installation of working meters for all of its customers.
In this situation, Georgetown said, CUC will lose a significant amount of revenue since the estimated cost billed to those customers are less than the average usage.
Georgetown said working meters are the “cash registers” of CUC’s billing system and it cannot afford to have a high percentage of non-working meters.
Dan V. Jackson, managing director of Economist.com, CUC’s rate consultant, said CUC is projecting to have 4,022 active metered residential customers and 5,029 unmetered residential customers this year.
In his testimony filed with CPUC on April 1, Jackson stated that CUC will have 516 active metered commercial customers and 1,002 unmetered commercial customers, 998 active metered government customers and 54 unmetered government customers.
Georgetown said the recent information provided by CUC indicated that approximately 3,000 residential customers are in the unmetered category.
But Georgetown said it also finds some positive development in CUC’s water and wastewater division.
It said the initial rate increases recommended and implemented in March 2009 have provided sufficient revenues for the division.
Georgetown said the revenue enhancement task force for the water and wastewater division is progressing in identifying billing issues.
However, it added, “while significant progress has been made, there remains a major effort required before CUC can demonstrate that it has properly metered and fully identified and billed all customers correctly.”
Based on the survey conducted by the task force, over 630 customers were connected to CUC’s wastewater system but were not paying monthly charges.
As of February 2010, over 95 percent of those customers had begun paying monthly charges to CUC, Jackson stated.
The remaining customers protested CUC’s finding that they were connected to the system. CUC is now looking into this issue.
Jackson said CUC identified another 630-640 potential wastewater customers that were within 200 feet of CUC’s collection lines.
They are required by regulation to hook into CUC’s system, he said.
