DeKalb CEO says “time is up” for customers with unpaid water bills
Six weeks after DeKalb County announced a deadline for people to clear up unpaid water and sewer bills, about 75% of those customers still haven’t paid. DeKalb CEO Michael Thurmond tells Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Richard Belcher “time is up.” But that does not mean cutoffs before or during the holidays. “We are waiting as we get through the holiday season because we are still recognizing that families are gathering, but time is up. And we are going to take whatever steps are necessary so that it’s there for all ratepayers,” Thurmond said.
DeKalb ended its water bill moratorium Sept. 1, 2021, but Channel 2 reported last summer that nearly a year after the moratorium ended, no customers had lost service. On Sept. 1 of this year, the county gave non-payers another month to pay or make arrangements to pay. Some folks are heeding the warning, but most are not.
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In August, Channel 2 reported that DeKalb’s focus was on 3836 customers the county calls “disengaged.” That number is now 2955, a reduction of 23%.
In August, those customers owed the county $19.2 million. Their balance is now $16 million, a reduction of almost 17%.
Those numbers show progress but also reveal there’s a long way to go in both the number of customers who aren’t paying and in reducing what they owe.
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We pressed the CEO about his phrase “time is up.”
“We’re down to the final days,” Thurmond told Channel 2, but added that to be “a successful leader, one has to have a tough mind and a tender heart.”
As a practical matter, here’s what a tender heart means in terms of cutoffs: “It won’t be until after the holidays.”
Thurmond acknowledges the county will have to write off some of the unpaid bills. “We know that we won’t collect 100%, but we’re going to collect every dime that we can,” he told Belcher.
He asked us to remember that he inherited a water system in complete disarray six year ago.
“We couldn’t send out a bill to 27,000 customers because we could not independently verify the accuracy of what was owed. And while we were correcting the system, people did fall out of the habit of making timely payments. Now I can’t blame the ratepayers for that, can I? It was just, we couldn’t get the job done,” he said.
For customers who want to get right but don’t have the money, Thurmond says there is help available through the DeKalb Tenant-Landlord Assistance Coalition and the Urban League of Greater Atlanta.
But it’s on customers to make the effort.
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