Water and Sewer

So, apparently the City of Sacramento is fairly inept in keeping track of what services it should be billing for for residential properties. Perhaps there's just too many bills and fees associated with living in California, maybe that's the problem.

A couple of weeks ago we got a letter fro the City of Sacramento welcoming us to our new home (that we've lived in for over a year and half now), and informing us that they would be handling our billing for water and sewer from now on.

A couple of days later we received another letter saying, basically, "Oops, it seems we've forgotten to bill you (and everyone in your complex) for the past year and a half, so we're going to bill you for past services as well". Lovely.

Now, I was under the impression that our HOA covered these services, so it was no surpise to me that I never received a bill in the last 20 months. A cursory examination of our HOA's expense reports shows that they pay over $10,000 a year to the City for water and sewer. But, apparently, that's only for the "common" areas of the property, and not individual units. Which mean that there's something in the neighborhood of $26,000 of up-till-now-un-billed services for the units in our small community.

How in the world did the City miss that??

So, in today's mail, we received our bill for the current month and the past 20 months, and no have until the 27th of July to pay the $653.50 balance. And you wonder why California is so screwed up? Great job to the Capital City for setting such a fine example of business practices.