DETROIT – Tens of thousands of Detroit residents with overdue water bills have signed up for a payment plan and kept their service since August, but hundreds are still being cut off each day, a city official testified Tuesday.
Mayor Mike Duggan’s chief of staff, Alexis Wiley, said a strategy to keep water flowing to homes and chip away at old bills is “absolutely” working. Critics, however, have a different opinion, and they’re asking a judge to stop shutoffs for six months and also order the city to restore water to people who have lost it since April.
People with overdue bills can put down 10 per cent and get into a payment plan. There’s also a $2 million fund to further assist customers with very low incomes, Wiley said, going over the details of Duggan’s 10-point plan.
READ MORE: Detroit water department under mayor’s control after shutoff criticism
Wiley said 30,000 customers have signed up for a payment plan.
On cross-examination, she acknowledged that 350 to 400 customers are losing water service daily.
“They were shutting off far more before that. We’ve reached a huge chunk of people,” Wiley said.
Nearly 45 per cent of the city’s 173,000 residential accounts were considered past due in late August.
READ MORE: Canadians to bring water to Detroit after taps shut off for thousands
Judge Steven Rhodes, who also is overseeing Detroit’s bankruptcy case, began hearing testimony Monday. A handful of residents who have lost water or on the verge of losing it talked about bathing with bottled water and the humiliation of having a blue line painted on the sidewalk, a sign to utility crews to turn off service.
The water department’s chief financial officer, Nicolette Bateson, said the agency would be adversely affected if the judge suspended shutoffs and allowed people to get water without paying for it.
“The department has very lean cash reserves,” Bateson said.
Comments