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Century Suffers Water Meter Woes After Company Goes Bankrupt
July 30, 2015
The Town of Century has been forced back to manually reading water meters, abandoning the automated reading capability of nearly 1,000 meters.
In 2010, Century purchased 941 water meters and associated software and equipment from Datamatic, Ltd. for $137,386. Company officials said the town was provided with $140,000 in discounts because a previously installed system sold by the company did not work as promised.
In a meeting with town officials, the company touted the accuracy of the new system, which they said would result in the town recouping most of the purchase price in additional billings due to increased meter efficiency.
Datamatic has now filed for bankruptcy, according to Mayor Freddie McCall, leaving Century with an automated meter system that does not work properly, and leaving Century without 40 meters that were at the company for repair.
McCall said that by returning to manually readings on the meters mistakes in the automated system have been eliminated, actually resulting in an increased profit for the water system.
Comments
10 Responses to “Century Suffers Water Meter Woes After Company Goes Bankrupt”
REGARDING:
” In my opinion, it is nothing to get angry about, for it is not worth the anger and the damage we might do to our COMMUNITY. ”
After all, it is only people defrauding people, promising what they don’t deliver.
I don’t know, if someone stole that much money from me, I would not be happy.
I don’t see where it hurts for people to express their unhappiness.
I also don’t see how it hurts the COMMUNITY to express displeasure with those outside of our COMMUNITY ripping us or our neighbors off.
David for better people
Oh, well. I wish this did not happen. But, I also know that we have a good Water Commission who are fallible, just like all of us. If they bought the meters with good intent, with our good intentions, cannot we give them a break this time, help them (and ourselves) to recover? In my opinion, it is nothing to get angry about, for it is not worth the anger and the damage we might do to our COMMUNITY. Let’s give the a break for making an honest mistake, until, at least, it is PROVEN otherwise. Those are some good people we have trying to make the best decisions that may, given the information they have before them.
If a water system does not make profit how does it have the funds to upgrade lines and/or add new lines? So yes they should profit. People do not understand the money that it takes to repair/maintain water service. One repair coupling can set you back from 30 bucks on a small line and up to 200 on large line.
As far as the automated meter system is concerned, a reputable automated meter company’s meters do not error. So don’t blame this fly by night company’s woes and inaccuracies on automated meters!
Here is the main problem that the Mayor and council should answer. If you bought crap that didn’t work in 2005 from a company that didn’t fix the problem, why did you let the same company sell you even more crap in 2010??
That’s like buying a new car and in 5 years when the motor blows up have the same dealer sell you another car instead of making right the problem.
CONSIDERING:
“McCall said that by returning to manually readings on the meters mistakes in the automated system have been eliminated, actually resulting in an increased profit for the water system.”
It was a BAAAAD system if it made more mistakes in reading than people visually reading and writing the numbers down.
Especially if the numbers were then entered into the computer by a second person reading the handwriting of the first.
David for RFID type readers, to read on the go
Radio read meters are not just to save time and effort, but they can also help improve safety. Most meters are installed in the right of way and with traffic coming close by, it can be a risk if the meter reader has to contend with that, especially on a busy road.
If they are good, they do increase the accuracy and they save labor expenses. If it takes 4 days to read a system’s meters and it could be reduced to 4 hours with radio read meters, that is days worth of work that can be put into improving the system elsewhere. We are on a different local water system in the area and I can tell you that there is a lot that goes into running a non-profit system. When you factor in the costs of equipment, employee costs with benefits (especially with the increases in healthcare insurance rates) while also planning for continuous upgrades to the aging components of the system, you can see that $20 minimums are not really out of line.
That said, I don’t know the specifics of Century’s problem, but I do feel sorry for them as they seemed to have invested in good faith, trying to upgrade their system. I hope that there is a legal resolution that can help them recoup their costs.
So it sounds like the new electronic meters are still useable. But are now being read manually versus drive-by data collecting?
I think SHO-NUFF is correct. Other cities with an investment 1000 times more than Century, certainly did not through up their hands and go back to manually reading meters.
Perhaps some friend(s) of the Mayor needed a job?
Let’s do the math on this; $137,000 down the well. It seems that a meter reader should be able to read every meter in Century in a couple of days. How many years of meter reading could have been accomplished with this $137,000?
Aww, does that mean the the meter guy actually has ta get outta his air conditioned truck & read the meter? Heaven forbid!
A town should not be in the water biz for profit, it is to provide water to taxpayers, nothing else. This $20 a month water is nonsense, of course people out west are paying $100 or more from what I hear, so I guess we are lucky.
Sometimes technology fails. But sometimes the old way of doing things was better to begin with….just a little more time involved.
The meter provider Datamatic,LTD, filed for bankruptcy in January 2014 well over a year ago. This is old news and should of been for the city of Century. According to Datamatics web site, they provided remote read systems for over 400 municipalities.
I would think the mayor could contact some of the other cities using the system and benchmark what they have done to resolve the issues,. Some cities were using over 30 thousand meters in systems and I doubt they have went back to manual reading.
If the hardware is in place it could be something simple as a software issue a local IT tech could figure out. Mr, Mayor needs to make some phone calls.