Getting undercharged for electricity doesn’t sound too bad - until the bill catches up with you. 

Some residents of Nirvana Hill and the Valley got an unpleasant surprise on their September utility bills.

“I was just kind of scanning down, looking at the bill and just about had a heart attack,” says resident Shawn Rudio.  “I saw that my bill the month before was $80 and then all of sudden it was $397 the next month.  So I was pretty shocked, but I just assumed that was a mistake.”

 A week later Rudio got another letter in the mail.

“I did get the letter after the fact, after I’d already been billed, explaining that the meters had been misread for 2 months.”

The letter that went out to customers in both neighborhoods explained that meters had been misread during June and July.  Public Utilities Director Dan Winters says a new lineman was responsible for the error.

“All of the meters were read low, which meant a higher bill for the next time.”

The difference was added to customers’ September bills, which for some people meant a tripling of their charges.

“The residents aren’t being penalized for this,” Winters says.  “They are just being charged for the electricity that they had."

But Rudio says the problem isn’t with the charge, it’s with how it was handled.

“If I’m using it, I’ll pay for it,” Rudio says. “But it would be nice to know if there is some change that extreme, that we know about it ahead of time.”

Winters doesn’t expect it to happen again.

“The situation that caused this issue has been taken care of.  I can say that it won’t happen again.

The City is offering a payment plan to help people spread out the unexpected cost.