By Alex Christodoulides
The city Department of Environmental Protection is owed several hundred million dollars for water and sewer charges it has not been able to collect from property owners who fail to pay their bills. In November DEP workers went around the city and borough with orange spray paint to identify with a “shut off water” stencil residential properties that were in arrears on their water bills, and the next step for any who did not pay would have been ripping up the street to shut off the sewer lines to those buildings.Selling stand-alone liens (without a property tax component) will lead to greater compliance, better collections and quicker resolution of any potential mistakes, Bloomberg said.Lien sales have been used to collect overdue water bills when property owners had also fallen behind in paying their property taxes. The new bill allows for multi-family properties with water and sewer accounts that are at least a year overdue, and that also owe at least $1,000, to be put into lien sales.”While only 15 percent of property owners have delinquent water and sewer bills, they account for approximately 87 percent of the money owed to the DEP, or approximately $600 million,” Bloomberg said. “This small percentage of delinquent payers continues to place a burden on the majority of responsible property owners who pay their bills on time.”City Councilmen James Gennaro (D-Fresh Meadows) and David Weprin (D-Hollis) have long advocated a means to improve bill collection at DEP. Gennaro praised the move, saying it ended DEP's push for an 18 percent hike in the water rates that was to have gone into effect in January.”We wanted to do avert an 18 percent mid-year rate increase, which we did. We wanted a more accurate billing system, which we're getting. And we wanted to make sure certain classes of housing were exempt from the lien sales,” Gennaro said.The bill protects one- and two-family houses from lien sales on their water and sewer bills, as well as senior citizens and low-income residents. “Larger buildings that have the financial resources to interact with DEP, those are the [building] classes where the money is,” he said.The legislation also prevents DEP from back-billing customers with broken meters, capping at two years the period in which the agency may claim funds it has not received. “This gives us the fairness to go after the people who don't pay their bills, that could and should,” Gennaro said.In November the agency began spray painting “shut off water” in orange on the street in front of eight Queens buildings with delinquent water and sewer accounts to identify where the road would be torn up and the sewer lines shut off if the account holder still failed to pay. In every instance, the property owner paid at least part of what was owed, with $508,000 of a total $728,457 collected citywide from 39 delinquent account holders.Reach reporter Alex Christodoulides by e-mail at achristodoulides@timesledger.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 155.
