The City Council voted to approve a $16 million water meter replacement project at its meeting earlier this month by a vote of 22-1 (Downs abstaining)-1 (Kelley) The City went through a major upgrade/replacement project of water meters in 2009 – installing meters with attached antennas to transmit information to City Hall eliminating the need for workers to manually get the information from homes (See Steve Annear’s article in Wicked Local here). Kelley voted against the item “due to past dissatisfaction with the transparency of DPW/Water Division over water leaks at two locations – Balcarres Road in West Newton and UMass Campus formerly Mt. Ida. She stated: “My goal was to get DPW to be transparent about water loss at these two locations, how much the cost to other users was, to learn from this and move forward. ” And added: “At this point, Newton does need the new transponders for sure, the person who was responsible in my view for previous problems is no longer a City employee, and I expect things to proceed in a better way”
Problems arose shortly after the installation of the meters in 2009.. According to the Newton Water Meter System Timeline 2009 – 2022 submitted to the Council at its April 4th meeting,“the mesh tech failed to give us the guaranteed 95% reading rate” and there were “(F)frequent failures due to battery depletion”. Attempts to work with other companies to replace failed parts and update software were made, but once the outdoor meters came online in 2015, the workload increased on the system, and by November of 2017, they began seeing a whole host of problems – software and hardware issues, RAM shortage, Hard Disk Drive space issues, limited support from the company and no one fully trained to solve the problems. By 2018 transmissions from the Ober tower dropped from 30K to 2K and residents began to complain about estimated bills. In 2019, there was a 30-40% drop in communication with antennas city-wide with residents around City Hall, Waban Hill, and Fire HQ receiving more estimated bills. Problems continued even with the upgrading of systems in 2020 and 2021.
Procurement of the meters and data collectors will go to bid immediately. The City expects that public outreach, notices, and scheduling will begin in July with installation to begin at the end of this summer with project completion by December 2023.
Residents who have issues with their water bills and estimates are advised to take a photo of the meter serial number and the meter reading and forward it to the City’s billing office at waterbilling@newtonma.gov. The water meter is connected to pipes that come down from the ceiling in your basement The meter serial number is on the top of the black cover. Lift the cover to read the numbers.
See: Water Meter Replacement Budget, Water Meter Timeline, Water Meter Replacement Project Powerpoint Presentation
