UNRESOLVED work orders pertaining to water leaks, unmetered waterline investigation, repair, maintenance, replacement and new installation are piling up at the Commonwealth Utilities Corp.’s water division, according to its former water and wastewater division manager, Mariano Iglesias.
After watching the Senate Committee on Public Utilities, Transportation and Communications meeting with CUC officials last week, Iglesias said he sent the committee a letter expressing his concerns about the issues regarding water revenue loss due to inaccurate meter readings and water leaks.
Iglesias, who now serves as the Office of Planning and Development engineer, shared some of his recommendations to address the longstanding problem.
He said CUC, among other things, must address outstanding water work orders, which remain a challenge and are “inhibiting” the water division from generating revenue.
Kevin Watson, CUC’s deputy executive director for water and wastewater, told senators in the meeting that during the excavation for a new sewer line project in Garapan, they discovered about 10 unmetered waterlines connected from CUC’s main pipes to commercial buildings.
Saying that there could be more, Watson added that it will take an “in-depth” audit on the part of CUC’s billing department and “a lot of footwork” to resolve these issues.
Watson also said that within three to six months, CUC will install meters on the tanks of 15 water reservoir sites. These meters will be more accurate and can provide CUC with “true knowledge of what we are actually producing,” he said.
In his letter to the Senate PUTC chairman, Sen. Paul A. Manglona, Iglesias said: “It is very concerning to hear the lack of preparedness [of] the senior management…as they were ill-prepared to answer simple questions regarding non-revenue water, electric component of the loss, and the lack of care with providing plausible solutions.”
He said earlier this year, the Palacios administration’s transition team visited CUC’s water and wastewater division and discovered that there were 5,348 outstanding work orders dating as far back as 2012. At the time of the visit, the division “was experiencing an uptake” of 490 work orders created from the previous month, Iglesias said. Of these work orders, he added, the division was able to resolve only 237.
Iglesias said if that trend continued, “it is safe to assume that the division would have realized approximately an additional 3,036 work orders in 12 months. This is unacceptable.”
He “highly recommends” that CUC’s water division train workers and shift manpower resources to staff the program with the goal of reducing work orders in the system.
