The wastewater division of the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. incurred a deficit of nearly $4 million during the last fiscal year, while millions of dollars that should be going to the division is being lost because of a loophole in the law that allows some non-residential customers to go unbilled for service, according to the Georgetown Consulting Group. <\/p>\n
Two areas in the wastewater billing process differ between residential and non-residential. For residential customers, whether metered or unmetered, they must pay a customer charge and are billed according to usage. But unlike residential customers, non-residential customers, whether metered or unmetered, do not pay a customer charge. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s pretty rare and a little bit strange, quite frankly,\u201d said Georgetown consultant Larry Gawlik before the Public Utilities Commission yesterday. <\/p>\n
But the bigger discrepancy is the fact that unmetered non-residential customers are not billed for usage at all. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you look at the nonresident customers, you\u2019ll see they can be billed if they have meter service, but if there is unmetered service, for some reason they can\u2019t be estimated. The law doesn\u2019t allow for them to billed,\u201d Gawlik said. <\/p>\n
He said he would not disclose names. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut let me just assure you there are some significant customers that fall in this group,\u201d he added. \u201cIn essence, they aren\u2019t paying any money at all for wastewater service. And that\u2019s just one example of many of the things that will be in the revenue cycle that, quite frankly, needs to be cleared up. That, I suspect, will literally be worth millions of dollars.\u201d <\/p>\n
Also, Gawlik said CUC has a high rate of uncollectible accounts. <\/p>\n
Typically, he said, a water utility will have an uncollectible allowance of a half percent. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo, in other words, they\u2019ll send out $100 worth of bills and collect everything but half a percent,\u201d or 50 cents, he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cIn CUC, that number is much higher. We have not been able to get our hands around it because it varies a lot, but it certainly appears to be significantly higher,\u201d Gawlik said. \u201cI mean well over a factor of 10 higher, well over a factor of 10.\u201d<\/p>\n
The information came out as proposed rate increases for wastewater, which have remained unchanged since 1987, were discussed. Both CUC and Georgetown agree wastewater rates should increase by 173.4 percent effective April 3, 2009, provided, however, that 50 percent of the increase should be suspended for approximately 60 days \u201c[t]o permit the CNMI government and\/or its entities to identify and tender to CUC funds from alternative sources,\u201d the agencies wrote in their stipulated agreement. <\/p>\n
Some of those sources include stimulus funds, Section 702 funds and $3.2 million in delinquent utility bills owed by the Public School System. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The wastewater division of the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. incurred a deficit of nearly $4 million during the last fiscal year, while millions of dollars that should be going to the division is being lost because of a loophole in the law that allows some non-residential customers to go unbilled for service, according to the Georgetown Consulting Group. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}