investigativevoice.com

By Ben Slivnick

As two lawyers pored over her water bills in a Baltimore City District Court meeting room, Rosa Nelson paced the hallway, exhausted from her second court appearance in as many weeks and complaining of a headache.

The Department of Public Works said she owed $2,292.23. Her most recent bill said she and her son consumed an average of 323 gallons of water a day in their public housing unit at the Townes at the Terraces. Now, she faced eviction and she didn’t understand why.

“This can’t be possible, not for a three-bedroom house and you don’t got no basement,” Nelson said. “I don’t know what to do anymore… I don’t know if it’s leaks, or if someone’s taking my water, but something’s going on to cause me to have a quarterly water bill that’s too high.”

Nine months since the Housing Authority of Baltimore City first caught wind of the sky-high water bills coming out of the Townes at the Terraces and ordered its property manager, Edgewood Management Company, to temporarily halt evictions, discrepancies about the bills still are trickling in.

Officials adjusted dozens of bills and put dozens more on payment plans last year after revealing that late fees ran up residents’ charges because Edgewood failed to deliver many tenants their bills over the course of two years. But a new round of evictions have raised new questions about what’s causing the bills to soar so high.

Carneater Mull, 33, moved into the Townes at the Terraces October 13, 2006. Three months later, she received a quarterly water bill charging her $1,775. A judge threw out those charges when she brought them to court last year, but her bills have continued to rise.

She suspected a running toilet and leaks in her hot water heater could have been driving up her bills, but said management ignored her calls for repairs.

“I kept reporting everything, but nobody ever came,” she said. “They take their time when they fixing stuff.”

When Judge Chris Panos examined her bill in court on July 16, he didn’t believe it. 

“Is this water used for the MCI Center?” he quipped.

Like many residents at Townes at the Terraces, Mull was new to paying water bills. The majority of public housing in the city includes utilities in the rent, and Edgewood had only begun charging tenants for water the month Mull arrived.

Edgewood’s lawyer Larry Caplan initially said the landlord did not have any record of leaks or water problems in the three eviction cases the management company has prosecuted this month. Now Caplan has agreed to postpone Mull’s case for two weeks to allow DPW to investigate her claim.

But Nelson, who also complained about leaks, agreed to a payment plan that addressed only her late fees. A bulge in her living room ceiling reveals the time water flooded from her bathroom three years ago, and she too has had problems with maintenance.

“I believe if they fixed every leak every time there was one, we wouldn’t have no high water bills,” Nelson said. “Every time I put in a work order, it never gets done.”

Caplan offered a different explanation for the high bills.

“Water bills are based on usage,” he said. “If there are lots of kids and maybe people aren’t careful about turning off the water, bills get high… The longer you go without paying the bills, the higher they get.”

Edgewood’s Executive Vice President George Caruso did not return repeated calls for comment.

The company has evicted at least three tenants for unpaid water bills, but since city officials intervened in the case last fall, City Councilman Bill Cole (D-11) said he thought most of the disputes had been resolved.

About 50 residents attended a meeting he hosted last October to review their claims that they hadn’t been receiving bills and that some were being charged for previous tenants’ usage. DPW and the housing authority addressed several more bills last winter.

“While I’m aware of a few outlying issues, I’d say the lion share of the issues at Townes at the Terraces have been addressed,” Cole said.

But after interviewing dozens of residents at the Townes at the Terraces, it seems likely that Nelson, Mull and a third neighbor Terri Jones won’t be the last to go to court. Several residents have resolved their bills, but others still haven’t paid them.

One resident explained that he hasn’t paid a water bill since Edgewood started charging him in 2006. His water meter is connected to multiple houses — a common practice in housing projects and apartments — but the resident, who declined to give his name fearing eviction, said he simply didn’t trust it.

“I don’t pay water bills,” the resident said. “I can’t see myself paying for other people’s water bills.”

Housing authority spokeswoman Cheron Porter said such confusion is common among public housing residents unaccustomed to paying for utilities.

“There are some people who are unfamiliar with paying those sorts of things,” she said. “There’s an adjustment period on the way to self-sufficiency and it’s the goal for all these tenants to become self-sufficient.”

While HABC has met with several tenants, Porter said the housing authority prefers to leave the matter to Edgewood.

“We just own the land,” she said. “We prefer to stay out of it, but we keep getting brought back in.”

Michelle Moore, Maryland field director for ACORN, said the disconnect between tenants and Edgewood points to the need for the housing authority to step up oversight. HABC owns the land at Townes at the Terraces, but leases it to Edgewood, who owns and manages the property.

“When you give someone money to manage public housing, you don’t just give them a contract for life,” she said. “If they’re not doing a good job, you find someone else.”

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it