CUC insists on progress in water metering

The Commonwealth Utilities Corp. disagrees with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s characterization that CUC has not made progress in installing water meters at locations that are currently unmetered.

CUC legal counsel Deborah E. Fisher said that based on its metering update submitted to EPA on July 28, 2011, covering the period between Feb. 21 through Aug. 15, 2011, CUC has accounted for about 336 unmetered and unregistered accounts, leaving a balance of 541 accounts left to reconcile.

Fisher said there were 826 change-outs of failed meters and 47 change-outs of old style precision meters.

Unfortunately, she said, CUC has experienced additional failures in the 2007 series meters, leaving the change-out balances at 461 units.

“In other words, in an approximately six-month period, we have changed out 873 meters in total, which is an average of almost five meters per day, or 25 meters per week. While the overall number is influenced by new failures, CUC’s progress has been steady,” she said.

In a report filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the NMI, EPA legal counsel Bradley R. O’Brien had said that based on CUC’s July 27 progress report on its metering program, three unmetered government accounts remain without meters since at least April. Similarly, O’Brien said, unmetered residential and commercial accounts appear little changed during the reporting period.

EPA encouraged CUC to complete meter installations for all unmetered accounts.

In CUC’s response filed Saturday in the district court, Fisher said that CUC reported in mid-2010 a customer count of about 11,500 waters meters on Saipan. Since that time, she said, CUC’s Saipan metered customer numbers have dropped to 7,997 accounts.

The reason for the drop, Fisher said, is that there were several meters installed by a third-party contractor from 2004 to 2005, where multifamily buildings were outfitted with a number of water meters equal to the number of electrical meters.

“Typically, only one water service was used for these buildings, leaving a number of meters in the customer database that were not actually in use,” she said.

Another reason for the decrease, Fisher said, is that there has been a drop in customer billings due to closed businesses and residential move-outs resulting from the depressed economy.

“This drop in metered accounts has placed continued financial pressure on CUC, both in reduced revenue from move-outs, but also from a drop in the monthly fixed charges that were assumed in our budgets and financial plans,” she said.

Fisher said that CUC is moving forward with its metering program as expeditiously as time and resources allow.

CUC expects its annual meter replacement rate to remain at about 10 percent for the near future. “While this number is above industry standards, until the old series 2004-2009 are fully retired, we will most likely not see a decline in the number of pending change-outs,” she said.

Fisher said that CUC is perplexed by EPA’s comments regarding focusing on unmetered accounts, as CUC previously understood their priority to be the change-out of failed meters.