WALSENBURG — People in Walsenburg say their water bills are a mess. As News 5 first reported, the city is under investigation by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for potential financial crimes.
People are at their wit’s end after four years of inaccurate utility bills and increasing fees. Now, we've learned why some citizens have seen monthly water bills in the thousands of dollars.
The small city of Walsenburg, 90 minutes south of Colorado Springs, is in the red. The mayor says his team reached out to the CBI to look into the books, in part, because of years of unexplained billing errors that are infuriating the people who live there.
WATCH: Walsenburg Mayor Gary Vezzani confirms that the city is under investigation.
No matter the weather, Dee Sandoval is out in her front yard multiple times a week to check her water meter. It is meant to report her daily water usage automatically, but it’s not always accurate, so Sandoval and her neighbors keep their own logs.
"So what I was doing, getting the meter read, writing the date and time I took it, and then I’d do that every two or three days until they supposedly read the meter themselves," said Sandoval.
Sandoval doesn’t have a faulty meter. Nearly every person in Walsenburg has to check their utility bill for inaccuracies.
"People were getting hundreds of thousands of dollars for their water bill,” said Carmen Jlara.
We met up with Jlara, a longtime resident, who up until recently sat on the city’s utility board. She says a few years ago, the city got a $500,000 grant to install $1 million worth of new residential ‘Metron’ water meters. Walsenburg runs its own gas, water, and sewer utilities. San Isabelle is the city's electricity provider.
"It's all really unbelievable, the problems that the city has, no one has been held accountable," said Jlara. "They put meters in, upside down, backwards, and they had said, 'This will fix our problems.' I said, 'It's not going to fix your problem, because a big part of the problem is the personnel that they don't understand how to input the data in the computer.'"
Mayor of Walsenburg Gary Vezzani says the utility billing issues have been going on for four years. What’s not clear is why some meters report accurately, while others report zero usage to the system, and whether human error is to blame when city workers go out to take the readings.
"What we think is, if something's wrong or they didn't get the reads, they'll go ahead and put an estimated read," Vezzani says of the city employees reading the meters.
Walsenburg uses a program called Cassell to input meter readings and manage its utility billing. After years of inexplicable billing errors, Vezzani says it’s part of the reason they called in the CBI to investigate whether there is financial misconduct in city hall.
"So we're going to get to the bottom of that part. That's the bottom line... We spent $1,000,001 on new meters to get these," said Vezzani.
We asked him about reports of meters being installed upside-down.
"Backwards. Yeah, that's when you think it rains, it pours," said Vezzani.
Meanwhile, Walsenburg is making a slow climb to repay a $20 million loan taken out in 2017 to refinance two water treatment plants, rebuild city lake and the northlands pump station. It had to institute set maintenance and debt service fees on utility bills.
"If they did raise them way back then, we could have kind of kept up and not been so serious. But last year, the year before, the water sewer fund went into red, and so we had to satisfy the bank's covenants; the bank’s requirement for the loan. We have to generate 120% more revenue than expenses ... We had no choice. We had to raise the rates,” said Vezzani.
Back at Sandoval’s house, she shows us the fees on her most recent bill.
"The water that I used actually is $12.68 but these are my fees (34.07 and 24.57) for the water," Sandoval said.
Those fees are $34.07 and $24.57.
"And then these are the fees for the sewer, almost 60 in fees," said Sandoval. "You got a 100 some odd dollars, basically in fees."
Further complicating matters, there are fewer residents living in the city and paying utility bills than when the loan was taken out.
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