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Science Society Picture Library / Getty Images file
A 400-watt, high-pressure sodium lamp.
A Connecticut woman managed to recoup almost $10,500 after her utility company acknowledged she had been erroneously billed for two street lights in the subdivision where she lived for 25 years, according to a ratepayer advocate in the state.
Her story is an object lesson in the value of studying the fine print.
Before Grace Edwards’ husband bought the house in 1987, it was owned by a developer who was paying the cost of the street lights intentionally, but for some reason the costs were never removed from the bill, according to a release by Office of Consumer Counsel, Connecticut's ratepayer advocate.
Each month there were two mysterious items on her Connecticut Light and Power bill worth about $20: "9500 Lumen HP Sodium" and "6300 Lumen HP Sodium," according to a report in the Hartford Courant.
"It (had) no more relevance to me than any other line items on the bill," she told the Courant.
She figured out what the bill meant only when a prospective buyer of her home requested a history of utility costs, and the records sent by CL&P were lower than what she actually paid. When she queried CL&P, a representative told her the difference was the cost of the street lights, the report said.
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At first, CL&P agreed to remove the charges from her bill, but not to reimburse her, the Office of Consumer Counsel release said.
"I called CL&P, wrote letters, did it all, but they were unresponsive to any kind of reimbursement," Edwards said, according to the release. “I really thought I was going to have to sue CL&P."
The Public Utilities Regulatory Authority was dismissive and rude, according to her account in the Courant report.
Edwards persisted, with the help of advocates at the Office of Consumer Counsel. Ultimately CL&P admitted it was at fault.
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On Friday, Edwards received a check from CL&P for $10,491.21 — about $5,800 of it for overpayment and the rest for 25 years' worth of interest. She also got an apology.
"Mrs. Edwards received service that is below our standards and we have apologized to her for the error and the inconvenience," CL&P said in a statement sent by media contact Mitch Gross. "We have reimbursed her in the amount that she was incorrectly billed plus interest, and will be using this case as a learning experience to identify process and customer service improvements to be sure this doesn’t happen again in the future."
Gross declined to answer other questions except to say: "This should not have reached this point."
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Leave a Comment:
I wonder...had she underpaid her bill for 30 years would she write that check?
Rick, The utility company wouldn't have let it go a month without throwing a fit, let alone 30 years.
after two months, the power company would have threatned to shut off her power.
Glad she won out against a power co.
LOL that was a REALLY stupid comment, Rick. I'm glad Ken O. was there to clear things up for ya.
Wrong, people fall under the radar all the time... and usually are found out eventually... not hard to imagine that someone calls their electric company to shut off their power... and the person remove the wrong person from billing, and just never notices.... the big difference being the woman would probably be arrested because she "knew" she wasn't paying for electricity.
So typical of all of the "Public" Utilities Regulatory agencies.
They should all be done away with, or financed strictly using utility company funding because their only loyalty is to the utility companies.
I wonder what is so hard to understand, for some people its just common sense which I guess is not that common.
I find this story hard to believe ...
Many states, have statutes of limitations in place that EXTREMELY hinder what a consumer can recover from a Public Utility. For example in New Jersey the FURTHEST a consumer can sue for overpayment to any Public Utility is 6 months.
Public Utilities on the other hand have the right to go after you for up to 10 years back billing.
So lets see hmm ......... as a CONSUMER if a Public utility over charges me for 5 years the most I can recover of that amount is 6 months.
As a Public Utility they can go after me for 10 years of back billing, sure sounds fair to me!
And I am sorry to say this information came to light the hard way after being billed 99 cents a month for like 4 years of electricity by PSE&G, they discovered their mistake, take a reading for one month and then billed me for 48 months x the one month reading they took! It was an ESTIMATED bill and it arrived at my house unannounced PAY NOW OR ELSE EXPECT A VISIT FROM THE LOCAL POLICE.
I spoke to several public advocates who pretty much told me I had no chance, even WITH a lawyer, so I have a VERY hard time believing ANY of this story ....
Drwho, I was buying it until you threw in the pay now or the police are coming?? I suspect you left out parts of the story like the line you spliced from your neighbor? Yes? It could also been the bodies they found from the Badda Bing when they were looking for underground cable on your property.
Either way pay your bills, stay out of trouble in the evening.
Yes, it's obvious she made the entire thing up in the hopes of seeing her name on nbcnews.com.
Congratulations, Grace, you did it!
It was a very threatening PAY NOW OR ELSE notice.
No warning.
No advance notice.
No splicing, just paid my 99 cent electric bill every month and on time ...
Really Dr Who? You got a $0.99 monthly electric bill for FOUR YEARS and didn't once think of calling someone and asking for clarification? No, you just thought to yourself what good luck you have, no one will notice.
What a moron.
they paid it because of the PR they were getting ... they could have fought it , probably could have got out of paying most of it . However people are not overly fond of utility companies anyway , and looking like the purposely hosed somebody just wasn't worth the 10k ....
@DrWho - I'd guess that you don't speak up when you're undercharged at a store or restaurant either. You probably gleefully feel like you got away with something and brag about it to your friends.
You clearly don't have any integrity, so now you get to experience a healthy dose of karma. Sounds fair to me - police warnings and all.
Be thankful PSE&G didn't tack on penalties or interest to the debt like CL&P added to this woman's refund.
$10,491.21
Considering she could have been awarded damages for over a quarter of a million dollars...or more, by a 12 person jury, if I was the company I would have reimbursed the consumer.
12 person juries, and damage claims can get very very expensive, plus the negative feedback, or that other consumers within that area would have started to look at their bills too...
...well, consumers SHOULD be looking at those line by line item charges.
As far as I know (IANAL) it is illegal to charge anyone for not paying their bills with a crime. They can report you to the credit bureaus. The only way the police come to your house is when they have an judgement from the courts saying they can seize property to make the bill right. Other than that I believe they would fail in charging you with a crime. At least this is my limited understanding of the way it works. If it worked they way you said then they could arrest you for CC, House payments, loans, unpaid bills of any kind.
In his case, it is theft. He knew his electric bill wasn't 99 cents a month and he did nothing but continue stealing electricity. Theft is a crime, therefore; punishable by law.
And another business fails to appreciate the need to quietly remedy these matters without making the national news. Poor thinking!
I would also like to add that PSE&G presented this to me as not paying the bill for 4 years.
When I asked them for an individual breakdown by month they were unable to provide it and admitted this was an 'estimated bill' .
When I asked them if I had not paid the bill for 4 years why didn't they cut off my power after 3 months they were unable to answer my question.
Unfortunately this was not in a court of law so I was steamrolled into paying the bill. Hiring a lawyer would have cost more than the bill and according to Public Advocates I had 0 chance of winning anyways .. Unless you happen to be a lawyer or person with near unlimited financial means (of which I am neither), you have little recourse against Public Utilities.
-IXLR8
I can only hope you have a run-in with your local utilities, Good luck proving your innocence. They, JUST LIKE YOU, assume GUILTY until proven INNOCENT beyond a shadow of a doubt.
I worked for a utility company for 15 years, and one of the first things the billing office looks at is the possibility of a stopped meter. The meter disc stops turning, but you still get elec power to your house. If the meter reader sees no consumption on your meter for 2 months in a row and they KNOW someone lives in the house, they are supposed to turn in that information so that someone else can come out and test/replace the meter with a new one. You should have done your part by coming forward after a few months and said something.
Geez, if you know something is wrong why don't you make a phone call?
Do you have copies of your recent bills? Do they have non-zero "balance"? You should have written to CPUC, with CC to the Attorney General. Also, all communication should be done in writing, or you need to record all telephone calls to the company.
-WiseOne
There were some unique circumstances, this was some time ago, and was my very first apartment and first establishment of a public Service Utility account. I really did not notice the 99 cents until about a year. At first I thought the building supplied the Gas and Electric, that is not SO unusual. I discretely asked others and discovered that somehow I was only being charged 99 cents per month for electric. Every month the bill arrived I paid what I was charged;
I will admit I thought I was in a good situation and was going to 'ride it out' for as long as I could. It did not seem to make sense to call up the Public Utility and insist that they bill me MORE. I paid the outstanding bill in installments, I was just VERY surprised to find that the most I could go after the public utility was for 6 months of payments whereas they had the legal right to go after me for up to 10 years of back payments. My point is the disparity of what each party was allowed to do to rectify the situation is SERIOUSLY slanted in favor of the utilities, WHAT A SURPRISE!
DrWho - You're suppose to use a little smaller magnet to "slow down" the wheel, not stop it! :) I'm joking; unless that's what you really did, then that is effing hilarious (not the huge bill later, but that you managed to get away with it for four years and those empty heads never caught it)!
Well I guess it didn't make sense for them to let you go on without paying what you owed either...
I'm glad she got taken care of. I had a funny spike in my water bill one month. I "almost" paid it, but instead I called the water dept and asked why my bill had jumped twenty dollars. The lady said it was because of the ELEVEN THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED GALLONS of water I had used last FEBRUARY. Like I filled a pool in February? And I live alone so it's not like somebody left the hose on for two weeks. After a couple of minutes she said "Just pay your usual $11.58 and write per Barb on the bill. All taken care of.
What did she expect from a public utility, and to think the Utility Company let this go on for so many years. Makes me wonder how many other people are getting ripped off.
Drwho, I find it hard to believe your story.
Agreed. Just someone trying to one-up the story to get attention.
I'm happy it worked out for her. The utility company should not have made her have to go through so much to get what she was owed. I would have been happy just to get back what I overpaid without interest.
Dr. Who you should not have been billed for their mistake you did not need a lawyer for this. Simple take it to small claims court and use as your defense YOU paid your bill as per their request for 4 years and they found their mistake and want you to pay for said mistake. That is a breach of contract and the judge would throw it out. As for the lady she should have been paid interest for all that time they in effect had her money. They should have caught the mistake earlier too.
Rocky,
She was paid interest. Quite a lot too. Read the story again. ;)
rocky...they did pay her interest...
Funny, when I read that sentence, I put a mental emphasis on the "should" as in "They SHOULD pay her intrest for all that time they had her money" (thus Rocky would be confirming agreement of the terms of the settlement), because some above have said she should not be entitled to it because of statute of limitations. They (the utility co) would not hesitate to charge HER interest so they SHOULD pay it in the reverse situation. Perhaps Rocky actually didn't read the article right and didn't realise she had gotten it in her settlement, but that's just the way I read it.
Also, I don't believe for one minute any of the hooey Dr W posted with the exception of the double standard, which I think should be eliminated. I just find it hard to believe that nothing in the billing red flagged an account that was making such small payments, or that the meter reader did not notice that no electricity was being spent at a home that was obviously using its fair share. It either would have been caught before it had gone that long or, if it DID happen (shyeah, right) and the crime they charged was specifically non payment of their bill, someone with half a brain cell would have done as Rocky suggested and taken it to small claims with all the proof you DID pay what they demanded and it was their own fault they didn't demand the correct amount or catch their error. I call BS on this one...
That's great the utility company refunded her the money. But the PUC un authority gives government a BAD name by not doing right by her.
State agencies should help the public by taking the necessary time to do their jobs.
This DID go on for too long.
All too often you hear that old excuse " Our computer says this or that" so we go by our computer. Computers are programmed with data entered by humans. Trash in, trash out. Its a weak excuse that doesn't count anymore.
Good for her. The utility company should have caught this years ago. So much for computers and who gets charged for a certain line name item.
I'm so glad she finally won. Now, what needs to be done, is fire every, single person in the utilitiies who did this to her. This goes from the CEO down the line to anyone who spoke to her on the phone or in person, with a total loss of their pensions. After that, each is charged a $10,000 fine (and if they can't pay it within three months, all they have, from their bank accounts to their homes, to any future paychecks) are taken to pay for it. And then all that money is given to this woman. Oh, and from now on, she can use all the power she does from the utility and is not charged a cent for it. The cost comes out of the pocket of those who run the utility and cannot be passed on to the consumers.
People who screw up this bad deserve to be punished until they suffer and held up as an example to anyone else who is just an incompetent.
Typical Utility Bullies.
She should now sue for time and effort to collect
and INTEREST!!!!!
(Begin Sarcasm) How in the world can these conversations go so long without some MORON trying to throw politics into the mix. COME ON PEOPLE!!!! Someone has to start blaming Bush or Obama. Get Busy. (End Sarcasm)
CL&P - short for Cheat, Lie & Pillage.
These idiots tried to come after me for a bill on service fraudulently taken in my name. I file a police report, discover the name of the perp - and they come back 5 years later and say that they still want to be paid because the police report was not a "Certified Copy".
...they still can't answer how they were paid for the service, and come up flaccid when I state that they are a party to the fraud since they took payment and cannot tell how it was transacted.
Oh, BTW - CL&P - if you are still out there looking at me - my offer stands - I'll sue the CEO personally if you want to keep up the stupidity of collection.
Imagine his look when one of his idiot underlings get's him to court on 5 year old bill reported as fraudulent service.
I wish this lady got em for the loss on her return on the money she could have put into an investment.
They have some stupid employees on board!!
I had a bill with AT&T for voicemail on a dedicated fax line that I installed and they would only credit me back 1 year. I also found out that the customer service representatives are given incentives to "add-on" to your bill which is what happened to me. I was billed for voicemail on a fax line. Wow!
Fact is it did happen and they couldnt Squirm out of it!!
the utility companies dont care for any hardships or any money u may have over paid till it becomes public then its we r so sorry u went to the media heres the money we owe u now shut up !!!
That's one of the problems. Companies, corporations and businesses only want to hire people who were "educated" to sit in front of a keyboard and clack away. They don't want people who can say - hey, wait, something's wrong here. It's time to hold those companies, corporations and businesses responsible for only wanting keyboard clackers, along with the keyboard clackers.
You're likely right about the sitting and clicking. I was working in customer service when we got a call from a gentleman who said he had been double charged on his account & wanted the excess refunded. We showed no errant charge but a fax of his bank statement showed we did, so we, of course, refunded it. He was very nice about it and made the offhand comment that it kind of bothered him having to call in each month because we had a glitch in his account. I then looked on the account history and he had been double charged and called in to have the errant charge reversed every month for about four months. He never complained about it except to ask for the refund and he certainly could have involved outside agencies but I told him that, instead of just processing the refund, I would try to track down the error so that hopefully, the double charges would stop.
Turns out, he had normally paid by auto debit from his card but had, four months previous, given our collection department the information to put the account on auto check. I pulled the hard copy records we keep of all the transactions each rep logs and saw that they had put this man's info in the account of the next caller on the log, but did not notice it. If I had not decided it was absurd to keep refunding this man every month and find out what happened, we could've had quite a hassle over it. We also now had an account that, in essence, had not made a payment in four months through no fault of their own and they certainly weren't going to call to complain that we had not billed them for several months, were they? We wrote off that as a small loss to keep two customers happy. It only takes a minute to ask "why?" when something like this comes up. Computers don't know enough to ask unless it's been prgrammed in. They can only do what a human has told them to do.
Utilities have guaranteed monopolies (thank your representatives for looking out for their best interests and disregarding yours); that makes them crooks from the go. Treat them accordingly.
Like the fed.gov, the communist democrats and socialist republicans, utilities have long outlived their usefulness.
You really have to watch the utility companies, they are as crooked as our Government. My wife and I own several duplex apartment buildings. Our tenants pay their own utilities. Once we had a tenant move out and found that Consumers Energy had drastically over billed this person due to the Estimated billing system (which is another scam), so much so that after a 3 month vacancy, the actual numbers still weren't close to catching up. We complained to Consumers Energy many times and contacted the previous tenant. One day, a Consumer's Energy truck pulled up without any notice and they were actually going to change out the gas meter, just to erase the evidence. Needless to say, I "escorted" the employee off my property and called Consumers Energy again and told them that if I caught anyone else from Consumers on my property without notification, I would kick their ass! Even though I caught the employee red handed and he showed me his work order, Consumers Energy actually denied sending anyone out to change the meter.
Watch your bills citizens. These Utility people are ALL crooks.
It's ALL Paul Ryan's fault. It was Bush's............For more on the Blame Game go to........No-Record-To-Run-On-Dot-Obama-Dot-Gov