On 10 November, I addressed the Utilities Board of Commissioners chaired by Edmund Archuleta about my bills from the Utilities Department for monthly water usage over the years. (Usage shown on its bills differs from usage shown on its monitoring app UtilityHawk.) My concern is not only the charges themselves, but also the possible bilking of citizens by systematic overcharges.
The Department’s and the Board’s explanations for an annual bell-shaped curve of water usage typify the response of City of Las Cruces government to citizen complaints. It never makes mistakes, citizens always make mistakes, so it has nothing to admit or explain.
In the case of excessive water bills, the Department and the Board propose various explanations, however implausible, for my problem and let me alone assume the costs of verifying or refuting them. The City takes no responsibility for the costs imposed if they are refuted. Meanwhile, it never considers a problem on its side of the meter, continues collecting revenues—a form of taxation without the name—to which it may not entitled, and enjoys the sanction of Councilors, currently Tessa Abeyta and Johana Bencomo, who sit on the Board.
In 2007, I bought a property with a stone wall on three sides, no pool, and a house built on a concrete pad. It had a drip irrigation system which I immediately tore out; I watered by measured bucketfuls until new vegetation was established by 2014.
Between 2007 and 2014, my wife and I used water in the usual ways: indoors for drinking water, bathing and showering, flushing toilets, doing laundry, cooking, and using the dishwasher; and outdoors for watering new shrubs and trees. Our water usage averaged 2000 to 4000 gallons per month throughout the year, with seasonal variations.
After my wife and I divorced and she moved out in 2014, I used water for the same purposes except that I stopped using the dishwasher. Yet the water usage reported on my bills not only did not decline, but actually increased. Some months, it was at the usual level; other months, it rose to or fell from spikes. My latest water bill reports October-through-October usage in these thousands of gallons:
2, 2, 6, 9, 11, 12 (March), 8, 8, 6, 5, 3, 3, 3.
On two or three different occasions since about 2018, staff from the Department have inspected my house—baths, showers, toilets, sinks, dishwasher, hot water heater, water softener—and found no leak. I told them that I had taken out a drip irrigation system, so they did not look for one. My plumber has probed or dug the ground in the front yard around the meter box and between it and the front walls of the house, and found no evidence of water. The Department has changed the water meter, with no noticeable difference; it shows a steady leak of about 1.5 gallons per hour.
The Department offers two explanations for this bell-shaped curve. A new one: a still-buried drip irrigation system unknown to me, with no visible connection or control box. The old one repeated every time staff inspect the premises: a leak, though leaks do not swell and shrink by a factor of six on an annual cycle.
Simple arithmetic shows that a leak cannot account for monthly water usage reported in my bills. A leak of 1.5 gallons per hour would amount to 36 gallons per day. Rounded to 40 gallons a day, the leak for a 30-day month would be 1200 gallons. If that much water leaked, the range of water usage would increase from 2000 to 4000 gallons, to 3200 to 5200 gallons, a range of water usage far below a range fluctuating from 6000 to 12,000 gallons over six months.
Again, simple arithmetic shows that a leak of 11,000 gallons in February and 12,000 gallons in March in my residence or on my property could not escape detection. One gallon equals 0.134 cubic inches; 12,000 gallons equals about 1,604 cubic feet of water. That volume of water would fill a pool 4 feet deep, 20 feet long, and 20 feet wide. That much water in my yard would turn it into quicksand.
During my presentation, Chair Archuleta offered a another possibility: a neighbor tapping into an outdoor faucet and using my hose attached to it. I am sure that a near-retirement nurse with no pool on one side and an elderly retired couple on the other with a hot-tub would not appreciate his gratuitous slur of water-pilfering. Of course, the possibility still leaves open where the water presumably diverted to their property went.
Given their efforts to deflect responsibility by imagining implausible explanations of reported wildly fluctuating water usage, the Department or the Board may soon imagine a George-Soros-funded, space-based tractor beam which draws water from my property up to the drought-plagued planet from which came The Man Who Fell to Earth.
In the meantime, the Department wants me not only to ignore these spikes, which I pay for, and consider only the most recent, a 3000-gallon month, but also to agree that the curve of annual water consumption with its spikes in years past will not recur. Despite its insistence that a leak must be on my side of the meter, the lack of evidence means that no leak is there to be found, certainly not one fluctuating wildly.
My conclusion: My problem arises in the Department, in its hardware, software, policies, or personnel. It persists because, after several years of complaint, it would be embarrassed to admit a mistake, and the Board, with Councilors on it, serves to spare it, not serve citizens with competent and honest government. Worse, my problem may be one shared by many others who have long been overcharged, as I have been.
My recommendation: a technical analysis, an accounting audit, a forensic review of both the analysis and the audit—all independent—, and a public report to the City Manager and the City Council. Also help for those who cannot face the facts, cannot admit a problem, and cannot adopt a reality-based approach to both facts and problems.
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