Corbella: $4,000 Enmax water bill has family drowning in difficulty

Verginia Ghobrial-Said feels as though City Hall is stealing from her and her family. It’s hard to blame her. In May, she and her husband Ramez Said received their utility bill from Enmax for a whopping $4,070.44. More than $3,800 of that bill is for water that Vergina says her family never used.

The 31-year-old investment adviser assistant says she received the usual email from Enmax one morning, informing her that her bill for May 15 was available. When she opened it, however, she was shocked.

“I was on my way to work when I read the amount on my phone and it was $4,000,” she said. “I thought it must have been an error, but I was getting fast heartbeats until I could phone Enmax at 8:30 a.m. I had two hours of severe anxiety.”

Those two hours have turned into four months of tears and frustration with Enmax and Calgary’s Water Services, with no satisfactory resolution for the young couple and their 14-month-old son, Sebastian, other than a huge bill they must pay or have their water turned off.

The budget-breaking bill indicates that the family used 1,180 cubic metres of water from February 25 to April 26 — or about 600 cubic metres per month. Previously, the most they had ever used was 17 cubic metres per month and their usual usage was less than 10 cubic metres of water or about $18 a month.

“Initially, we were worried that maybe we had a big leak somewhere and our house was in danger of getting damaged,” explained Verginia.

An Enmax water technician came to their Coventry Hills home in northeast Calgary to investigate on May 27. 

“I showed him around to prove that we haven’t had any floods. I said, ‘See, there is no water staining anywhere.’ He said, ‘There’s no way that this amount of water can go unnoticed; it would have been pouring out of your basement windows since it’s the equivalent of filling an Olympic-sized swimming pool or as much water as a 60-unit apartment building uses in a month.'”

The technician replaced the water meter at Verginia’s request and the old water meter was apparently tested, according to Enmax. Since then, their water bills are back to normal. Verginia also hired a plumber to come over. He checked all the toilets and inspected the premises and said everything was functioning well.

In a June 26 letter, Charlotte Hermann, Enmax’s contract services co-ordinator, told Verginia: “The meter test confirmed that the meter is functioning properly and it is unfortunate that this is an undetermined high consumption.”

The letter goes on to say that after reviewing Verginia’s case they will remove 30 per cent of the water bill, or $1,084, sticking the family with a $2,800 bill. Enmax is making it sound like it is doing this family a favour, when it’s obvious that they never used this enormous amount of water.

“I feel like we’ve been robbed,” says Verginia, who says she’s lost sleep over this issue and has spent numerous hours on the phone trying to negotiate a repayment plan with Enmax, often to the point of tears. She asked to pay the bill back over 24 months, but in a two-hour phone negotiation, Enmax eventually budged from 12 months to 15 months.

“It’s like they’re using my tax dollars against me,” she said.

“If we had used this water or even wasted this water, I wouldn’t complain, but we didn’t. This is legalized theft by the city. It’s like they’ve reached into my pocket. Like I’ve been mugged,” said Verginia.

Like most bullies who run and hide when confronted, Enmax and the City of Calgary wouldn’t speak to Postmedia. Instead they sent a joint statement, which reads in part: “We understand that receiving a high bill can be stressful and we make every effort to understand our customer’s particular situations.

“Customers are often surprised by how much water can be consumed in a month,” reads the statement. “For example, a leaky toilet can use up to 22 litres of water per minute, which can add up to as much as $3,000 per month with water and associated fees.” 

Meanwhile, on the City of Vancouver website it says a leaky toilet can waste 750 litres of water per day at a cost of $270 per year. That’s an enormous discrepancy.

Verginia says when people learn of their predicament they sometimes say things like, “‘you could go on a really nice vacation for that amount of money,” or “that would pay for one year of Sebastian’s university,” but for us, we have to cut things from our budget to pay for this bill. I’ve just returned to work after maternity leave and we have daycare costs. This is a big hardship for us.”

And Verginia and Ramez are not alone. Taghrid El-Rafih got a water bill for $2,485.12 in the spring. Prior to receiving that whopper of a bill, the mother of three said she called Enmax one month earlier to find out why she hadn’t been charged for water at all. 

“I spoke to someone called Melissa who said it was rare to get a call from someone for not getting billed,” she said. Instead of looking into it, Enmax let the problem continue until they sent her the almost $2,500 bill.

“Instead of warning me that something was wrong, they left it and sent me a bill for two months,” said El-Rafih from her Marlborough home. “I told them, ‘We can’t afford a $2,500 bill.’ And, they told me, ‘Well, you better pay up or you won’t get any water next month.’  El-Rafih has been given 12 months to pay and had $550 removed from her bill.

The organizations’ joint statement says: “The City of Calgary and Enmax take great care to ensure that our metering and billing systems are accurate and we use these systems to proactively track and notify our customers about significant changes in consumption.”

Obviously, that is not what happened in these two cases.

“I was forced to beg Enmax for a break on payment options for something we didn’t use. I was in tears. It was humiliating. They wanted me to pay over six months but after crying on the phone they said we could pay it back in 12 months,” said El-Rafih, who also had her meter replaced and was told there was no problem with the old one. 

Meanwhile, CTV Calgary News has found at least five people with very similar stories, including one from a man who received a $600 water bill for one month while he was on vacation in Mexico.

“The problem with this is there’s no one to go to, to complain,” says Verginia. “There’s no independent body to challenge something I know isn’t right.”

Enmax tells her to call the city’s water services and the city tells her to call Enmax — a vicious circle that bites hard.

Alberta’s Utilities Consumer Advocate has jurisdiction over electricity and natural gas issues only. Water is a municipal concern. It’s as clear as water that something needs to be done for these wronged individuals and for the system as a whole. A consumer advocate needs to be established for Calgary water consumers, since Enmax has proven to be all wet on this. It’s impossible to believe that people living in our modern world would or could place so much faith in machines. 

It’s long past time for the city-owned utility to return these injured people their money and apologize.

Licia Corbella is a Calgary Herald columnist. lcorbella@postmedia.com