No more water shutoffs in Opa-locka, Miami-Dade mayor tells staff

Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Giménez told his water and sewer department on Tuesday not to shut off water for Opa-locka residents. Instead, he told them to develop payment plans with property owners who haven’t paid their bills.

The move came hours after an attorney sent a cease and desist letter to Giménez and held a press conference, saying a lawsuit would be filed if the county didn’t agree to stop shutting off water or threatening to do so for property owners in default.

Several properties in Opa-locka have been threatened with water shutoffs for failing to pay bills that skyrocketed in recent months, while at least two small apartment buildings have experienced shutoffs.

Giménez initially declined to comment Tuesday morning, but he later sent a tweet saying he had been briefed on the matter and directed Water and Sewer Director Kevin Lynskey to pursue the payment plans.

The Miami Herald asked a spokeswoman for Giménez, Patty Abril, whether Giménez had also directed Lynskey not to shut off water for these account holders.

“Correct. No shutting off water,” Abril said.

Michael Pizzi, the lawyer who sent the cease and desist letter, commended the mayor’s decision Tuesday evening.

“I am happy that the mayor and the county have agreed to our demand that the county stop turning off the water on the people of Opa-locka,” Pizzi said. “That is a victory for the average citizen.”

Joey Williams, the manager at two side-by-side buildings on Northwest 135th Street near 27th Avenue, told the Herald on Tuesday that residents in one of the buildings went without water for nearly three days last week after service was disconnected.

Williams said he brought five-gallon buckets of water to a mother living in the building so her kids could bathe and use the toilet.

“The kids had tests [in school] that Friday, so the kids couldn’t be out of school,” Williams said. “I gave them water where she can bathe the kids, where they can be able to take a bath and go to school the next day.”

Eliezer Alvarado, a resident who lives with his sister and her 1-year-old child, said it was a challenging few days.

“I couldn’t take a shower. I couldn’t feed my dogs,” he said.

On Friday, the Herald reported that a technical problem resulted in artificially low water bills in Opa-locka, and that the county had sent higher bills — including one for more than $135,000 for an apartment complex that previously received monthly bills around $2,000 — as it tried to collect payments for several months of past use.

Douglas Yoder, the deputy director of the water and sewer department, explained in more detail Tuesday how that happened.

After county officials saw a spike in complaints about high bills last summer, they started looking into whether water meters had been set up to provide readings in thousands of gallons of water, as they initially believed, or in hundreds of gallons.

The issue was potentially affecting about 1,500 meters, Yoder said, which represented the final batch of Opa-locka water accounts to be transferred from the city to the county. The city contracted with the county for water billing three years ago in the wake of reports of rampant fraud and malfeasance in the Opa-locka system.

Workers began going around the city to examine the meters, Yoder said. While the review was ongoing, the county adjusted customers’ bills to give them the benefit of the doubt, he said, by assuming the meters were reading in hundreds.

But ultimately, Yoder said, officials found that they were correct from the start.

“What we found was that, indeed, they had initially been measuring correctly and that they were set up to measure at the thousand-gallon flow rate,” he said. “That meant people had been paying, in reality, for less water than they were using.”

Yoder said the county decided to try to recover money owed for about 250 of the 1,500 accounts — specifically, commercial buildings and residences with four units or more.

In November, the county sent a notice to those property owners along with their bills, Yoder said.

The notice read in part: “A pre-billing audit has identified some Opa-locka accounts that have been billed at lower consumption rate than was actually measured by the meter. This means that your bill amount may be higher than prior bills which were lower than they should have been.”

The notice didn’t provide details about the hundreds versus thousands billing debacle, but it instructed anyone who wanted to request a “high bill investigation” or who needed help with a payment plan for the back-billed amount to email the department.

Yoder said he’s aware of only one such plan that’s been drawn up out of the 250 accounts.

“My impression is that we have not gotten a lot of either calls or email responses,” Yoder said. “Our mayor’s directive is that we make reasonable payment plans available to anybody who is in arrears on their bill. That’s certainly what we’ll do, but they need to make the request.”

Pizzi, the attorney who sent the cease and desist letter, was only partially satisfied with the county’s response. He told the Herald property owners should not have to pay the “astronomical bills” they received.

The owner of the building managed by Williams, Raul Fernandez, said the county turned off the water because he hadn’t paid bills that he believes are inaccurate. Fernandez is disputing the bills in a lawsuit.

When a crew came to turn the water back on after Pizzi won an injunction in court, water started gushing out of the ground, Fernandez said, causing flooding and forcing residents to go without water for an extra night.

Fernandez says his bills at that property have fluctuated wildly for years and that they spiked from around $400 to over $16,000 in the past year with no explanation.

The billing problems run deeper than a single mistake, Fernandez said. At another of his properties in Opa-locka, he said he paid his bills each month, but the balance would carry over to the next month as if he hadn’t paid.

“What we thought was gonna happen [when the county took over Opa-locka billing] was that the meters were gonna actually get read and that we were gonna get billed a fair and just rate,” Fernandez said Tuesday. “We’re not.”

Pizzi said the transition from city to county billing has been “confusing and convoluted.”

“Everybody knew that the water billing process in Opa-locka was a massive disaster, and for that reason the county should have taken extra care to make sure they got it right,” he said.

The clash with the county represents a new front in the long-running battle over water billing in Opa-locka.

In 2017, Pizzi filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of residents against the city after reports of faulty meters, corruption and overcharging, including employees shaking down residents for cash and bills being waived for politically connected customers, were made public.

Last April, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Beatrice Butchko certified a class of 30,000 current and former Opa-locka water users seeking repayment for past fraud and waste, including homeowners who testified about monthly bills exceeding $1,000 based on estimates as opposed to actual meter readings. The city is appealing the class certification ruling.