Cochran discovers water meter issue that caused high bills

An issue with recently installed water meters has led to some Cochran residents receiving unexpectedly high water bills up to 10 times more than normal, according to the city.

Cochran City Clerk Candace Summerall explained that the city had a contract with a meter company to install new meters around seven years ago with a 10-year warranty on the equipment. Over the past year, the city has had to replace a number of these meters, but the replacement meters were measuring water usage differently than the original ones.

“The company did not notify us that was what the case was,” Summerall said. “So we entered the information from the meter into the system the same way as the old meter, and it was measuring in gallons and not tenths (of gallons).”

This discrepancy resulted in some customers seeing water bills that were significantly higher than normal without any apparent leaks. Summerall praised the city’s utility billing clerk for discovering the root cause of the problem after extensive research.

“We had these citizens who had just astronomically large bills that could not be explained until she took the lead on that and found out what the problem was after hours of research on that,” she said.

The city has already provided credits to some affected customers due to the anomalies in water usage and is now working to identify all the meters that were impacted by the measurement change. Summerall said a full audit of the city’s meters will be conducted over the next year to ensure accurate billing going forward.

In the meantime, Cochran residents can expect to see their water bills return to normal levels as the city resolves the meter measurement issue.