NEW ORLEANS — For years, the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board has been hit with complaints, audits, investigations, and recently, city and state intervention into its ongoing billing problems.
When none of those measures worked, the City Council last month hired an outside company to completely take over the agency's appeals process for billing disputes. The new system not only seems to be working, but suddenly appeals that took years are now being resolved in hours.
The contractor, Hammerman and Gainer, better known as HGI, took over all new billing disputes starting on Sept. 1.
The early results of the out-sourcing seem promising, according to Councilman Joe Giarrusso.
“We exercised probably more patience than we needed in doing this and we gave them enough time to try and fix this,” Giarrusso said. “And now we're happy that the contractor has come in and really in fairly short order started fixing and righting the ship.”
The contract, which could top $3 million, was approved after a series of in-house remedies did not seem to alleviate wholesale erroneous bills or streamline the labyrinthine appeals process.
WWL Louisiana spoke to one of the first customers to use the new appeals process. The woman, who lives alone in a small rental, said that two years ago her typical $100 to $120 monthly bill spiked to $600 to $1,000 a month.
The customer, who requested anonymity, was dumbfounded as to why her bills went from reasonable to ridiculous. She checked for leaks and found none. She got an inspection by the utility. She tried to appeal.
Finally, two weeks ago, the woman’s water was shut off.
“It was stressful. I was devastated,” she said. “I couldn't stay because I didn't have any water.”
The woman never did get a hearing, but she saw a recent story on WWL Louisiana as part of the station’s “Down the Drain” investigative series about longstanding S&WB issues.
In that two-part story, Gentilly grandmother Adline Gaudin had reached her breaking point after battling the Sewerage and Water Board for two years when her bill skyrocketed to more than $36,000.
Living with only her nine-year-old granddaughter, Gaudin knew the bills were wrong, but multiple appeals went nowhere. When WWL Louisiana stepped in, the utility first knocked her bill down to $9,000, a figure that was still out of whack. After the station enlisted help from Councilman Eugene Green, the agency re-investigated and found they had mixed her meter with her neighbor.
The S&WB knocked her bill down to zero.
The woman whose water was shut off said, “The last story that you ran, changed my situation, changed my life. So no telling how many people this will help.”
With this most recent case, the station was able to direct the customer to HGI.
“Something that I've been dealing with since 2022 this agency was able to resolve for me in less than an hour,” she said. “It was a relief. And I couldn't have done it without you and the help of the company.”
A full accounting of the progress is still being compiled but data assembled by Giarrusso's office shows that while bill complaints are still coming in by the dozens each day, they're also being resolved by the dozens each day.
“I think all of us are sort of asking, hey, why wasn't this done earlier?” Giarrusso asked.
The Sewerage and Water Board declined requests for an interview about the new process. A public records request on how many outstanding disputes have been resolved is pending, the agency said.
While information about the new dispute process is not yet widely known, Giarrusso and other council members say their offices are now directing constituents straight to HGI any time they get a complaint.
Under a tab for billings disputes on the S&WB website, the utility includes this phone number to contact HGI directly: (504) 910-6484. Or customers can send an email to: support@swbno.zohodesk.com.
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