Trickle-down behavior at water company

Since Glendale Water and Power bills bi-monthly, customers receive six bills per year. Inexplicably, I only received three. Had I not been monitoring the situation, I might not have noticed the missing bill, missed my payment and been out of luck as far as getting my deposit back. I checked around online to see what percentage of U.S. mail is either lost or undelivered. While the U.S. Postal Service does not provide a concrete statistic for this, the general consensus is 3% to 5%.

While I can't prove any negligence or wrongdoing, much like Norton couldn't prove either when he was grossly overcharged, I find it remarkable that 50% of my bills never arrived. With a number that far out of the norm for undelivered mail, one might conclude either: Glendale Water and Power's billing system is flawed, the utility was trying to trip me up in order to keep my security deposit, or the Postal Service just hates delivering Glendale Water and Power bills. By the way, over this same period, not one other bill of mine went undelivered. Go figure.

So why bring this up now? Well for starters, I want my $850 back on Friday and I don't want any funny stuff from Glendale Water and Power claiming I didn't pay any of my bills on time, because I did.

More importantly, I bring this up at a time when Glendale Water and Power is trying to raise rates, partially as a result of millions in lost revenues during mandatory conservation. Utility officials have been saying the "average residential family" (using 1,900 cubic feet of water in a month) will only pay about $2.50 more per month for water.

That's a nice friendly number, until you go from average to specific. For me personally, my bill would be about $10 more per month during pool season and $5 during the rest of the year — so that would be about $80 more per year.

Consider the fact that 24,547 payment extensions were granted by Glendale Water and Power last fiscal year — a 5% increase compared with the fiscal year ending in 2009, and a 21% increase to the previous year, according to a report earlier this year.

That's about one extension for every three of the utility's 80,000 customers. So just how does Glendale Water and Power expect its customer base to pay more when one-third of them are struggling to keep up with existing rates?