Ninety-one percent of the installed meters are operational, CUC Deputy Executive Director Alan W. Fletcher told Variety.
“The one point to emphasize is CUC’s progress in meeting the federal requirement for consumption billing,” he said.
He attributed the progress to team effort, with employees from meter-reading, billing, customer service and operations working together to complete the task.
In a report, Fletcher said from Aug 10 to Nov. 11 CUC accounted for 3,195 unmetered and unregistered accounts.
406 accounts need to be reconciled, he added.
He said CUC has made great strides in the last year in the replacement of failed meters.
CUC also made improvements in the documentation and installation of unregistered meters and accounts, he added.
His report showed that as of Nov. 25 there were 831 pending accounts to be resolved. On Aug. 18, there were 6,411 while on Oct. 3 there were 910 unresolved accounts.
As of yesterday, Fletcher said 5,580 accounts had been resolved.
Fletcher said the one byproduct of their water meter investigations is the “true-up” of metered accounts.
He said in mid-2010, CUC reported a customer count of 13,050 water meters.
Metered customer accounts now stand at 9,194 accounts, a decline of 3,856, or about 29 percent, he said.
There are two reasons for the drop: “First due to the number of meters installed by a third-party contractor circa 2004-2005, multifamily buildings were outfitted with a number of water meters equal to the number of electrical meters.”
Second, there was a drop in customer billings due to closed businesses and residential move-outs resulting from the depressed economy.
In a multifamily building, Fletcher said typically, only one water service was used, leaving a number of meters in the customer database that were not actually in use and listed as unregistered accounts.
The drop in metered accounts has placed a financial pressure on CUC, he added.
