Thursday, July 31, 2008
Officials plan to ask for bids in the near future.
GIRARD — City residents and other customers receiving water from the city may soon see much more accurate readings of their water meters.
City council has given Safety Service Director Jerry Lambert approval to seek bids for remote-access water meter readers. Members of council and city administration have long said the remote readers would be a benefit to the city.
Lambert said the city will go out for bid on the remote readers as soon as possible. He said the city will consult with the company issuing its current water department material to make sure the bid specifications are compatible to the city’s current system.
“We want to make this fair for all those bidding, so you want systems that are universal for the products we are going to use,” said Lambert. “We will go with the current company for the immediate specs because they are already here and it has to fit our system, but we want the specs general enough for other companies to bid on them.”
The city, earlier this summer, started a door-to-door meter-reading campaign with the goal to read as many meters in the city as possible — every meter if possible. Water meters had not been read in five years.
City officials have said official readings of the meters, instead of estimates and resident readings, would give a much more accurate picture of how much water is being used. Customers had been calling in their own meter readings.
Lambert has said city officials understood from the beginning of the door-to-door process that reading every meter was somewhat of a lofty goal. He said officials figured reading 25 percent of the actual meters in the city would be more realistic, and that is pretty close to what was done.
Meter readers read about 24 percent of the meters in the city.
It is unclear whether the remote readers will help reduce the negative balance in the city’s water fund.
City Auditor Sam Zirafi said the water fund had been in the red by about $350,000 at the start of the year. That figure fluctuates, he said, with each bimonthly billing cycle.
Zirafi said the remote readers would be beneficial in that the readings would be timely, much more accurate and likely done on a monthly basis. He said the reasons for the negative balance in the water fund, however, are multifaceted.
One explanation Zirafi offers for the red ink in the fund is that the city’s bill from water suppliers has increased by 62 percent since 1999. Only about 32 percent of those costs, he said, have been passed onto city water customers.
jgoodwin@vindy.com