DeKalb County has begun a three-year program to replace 102,000 water meters, partially funded by a legal settlement reached last year with a meter manufacturer.The county has created an interactive online map where residents can to determine, by entering their address, if they will be receiving a new meter and in what month the replacement is scheduled.
The meter-replacement program comes four years after the county began receiving complaints about inaccurate and exaggerated meter readings in 2015. The county plans to replace 102,000 aging and potentially defective water meters, including 54,500 out-of-lifecycle meters and 47,500 potentially defective meters.
"DeKalb County failed to follow a water meter replacement plan. We should have been replaced them every 15 years," County CEO Michael Thurmond told county commissioners in a presentation in March. "We just didn't have enough staff in place to get the job done."
"We had deficits in leadership, management and oversight," he said.
Thurmond said as many as 3 to 5 percent of the county's water meters have not been counting any water usage at all. Only some of these are vacant properties. "That is going to change," he said. "If you are a customer who hasn't been paying for your water for the past 15 years, you are going to get a call."
"The new meters are more accurate by design," Thurmond said.
Under the county's "New Day Project," all 194,000 of the county's water billing customers have returned to a normal billing cycle, with a state-of-the-art billing system and reduced wait times for customer service, he said.
A "New Day Project" web page has information about the new meter program. The county says efforts will be made to reach all affected water billing customers five times during meter replacement work. This will include door hangers to inform customers when a meter is being installed and after the work is completed.
The "New Day Project" was approved by commissioners one year ago. It was initally to be a 90-day strategy to reduce errors involving meter installations, meter readings, billings and meter inventory.
Last summer, the Board of Commissioners approved a legal settlement with Kendall Supply Inc. and Sensus USA Inc. to replace 47,500 water meters over two years. Between 2011 and 2015, DeKalb County's Department of Watershed Management bought and installed about 50,000 iPerl water meters. The county later concluded that the iPerl meters, manufactured prior to 2014, contained a manufacturing defect. It began replacing those meters with Accustream meters.
