A crowd packed Monday’s meeting of the North Sumter County Utility Dependent District Board and most of the Villagers had eerily similar stories.
Lois Jaworski of the Village of Hadley shared her story.
She received a call from the utility department in October 2021 warning her of a sudden spike in her water usage. It frightened her.
“We walked the property. We thought we were going to have sinkhole,” she told the NSCUDD board.
Like so many other residents of The Villages, she had a sudden spike of thousands of gallons of water usage. And then mysteriously, the usage receded back to its normal level in the house she has lived in since 2008. They never found a leak.
“There’s something that is causing a spike. Has an investigation ever been done?” she asked. “The bottom line is leaks don’t fix themselves.”
She pointed to all of the residents in the meeting room who have experienced the same problem and told their stories at the podium.
Many of the residents said they had been up north and their water was shut off when the spikes occurred.
Cliff Wiener of the Property Owners Association said his organization asked residents for their stories about water usage spikes and in response to the query, the POA received 500 emails from residents.
“You guys have a problem and you need to address it,” Wiener told the board.
He also said he objected to the dismissive treatment of residents by customer service representatives with the billing department.
Several residents, with engineering backgrounds, asked pointed questions about meter calibration while other residents recounted their frustrating calls to the utility billing department in which they were given the dreaded “leaky toilet” explanation.
Villager Ken Knodel questioned a recent public relations blitz by the District Office, including an Opinion piece by Utility Billing and Collections Manager Brandi Ricker published in The Villages Daily Sun, a “fact sheet” that seemed to rebut the horror stories from residents and a “Water Matters” event set for April 22 at Lake Sumter Landing.
Knodel alleged that the PR blitz was aimed at delegitimizing the complaints lodged by residents.
It’s clear that some NSCUDD directors, who are Villagers elected to serve on the board, were troubled by the stories they heard.
“How many times do we need to hear from our customers that there is a problem?” asked NSCUDD Director Dan Warren.
NSCUDD Director Lisa Johnson held up her water bill and said she’d experienced a spike in her water usage.
“We’re going to stay on this,” she said.
