This is an opinion column.

Four jobs. Just four.

Birmingham Water Works Board member Dr. George Munchus is fond of saying water systems, no matter their size, have four jobs: repair leaks and replace aging infrastructure, oversee billing and collections, navigate litigation, and manage people.

Just four jobs.

Like a table with a faulty leg, the bedraggled Birmingham Water Works is on the brink of collapsing, of tumbling over its singular ineptitude in what might be—or should be—its easiest job: reading meters and sending accurate bills to its 200,000 customers. To the people who trust what they’re being charged is an accurate account of their water usage.

Or trusted—until what they began receiving in the mail read more like a Stephen King novel than a water bill. More like a Jordan Peele film.

More like a bank stick-up note.

Even before the results of a board-authorized billing audit were revealed last week, we knew the BWWB was drowning and flailing to keep itself afloat by pulling down customers like an unforgiving undertow.

Related: Birmingham Water Works took over a year to correct billing issues, audit shows.

We knew because elected officials at all levels knew and were hearing it all from angry, fearful, beleaguered water users. From folks whose rallying cries are still embodied by Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin’s priceless August social media rant: “Good morning to everyone except the water words board….” From folks who’ve “been blowing up my phone for months,” says Jefferson County Commissioner Sheila Tyson.

I knew—after receiving a four-figure water bill (multiple times higher than any previous bill) just months after closing on a home that made me a BWWB customer. A home no one lives in for half of each month.

Former BWWB general manager Mac Underwood was hired to oversee the audit—to verify what current general manager Michael Johnson no doubt knew. Though what Underwood found, he said, “was worse than we thought.”

Starting in August 2021, the BWW began failing to send bills to all customers. Initially, just over 7,000 water users were unbilled; by December, the number was nearly 85,000. That was just the first wave, which was then exacerbated by what Underwood called “mass estimations” (I call it: pulling a guess out of one’s ear, a guess that would never be an underestimation). The audit revealed 135,261 such mass messes in December 2021 and January 2022.

Then came this wave: bills deemed “implausible”—inexplicably high—are assessed by individuals. Between December 2021 through July 2022, the number of implausible bills each month ranged from a low of 1,864 (December) to 5,942 (June).

Johnson blames COVID-19 and the loss of employees that certainly impacted all entities emerging from the depths of the global pandemic last summer. Hearing that now, though, sounds like “the dog ate my meter readers.”

“Meter readers are the lowest paid job [we have], and most important,” Johnson said. Yet their task seems like an antiquated, failed math equation. An implausible equation. Each day, 10,000 meters are read manually; the goal is to gauge each meter between every 24 and 37 days. With about three dozen readers currently employed, well, that’s more than 250 meters per day.

That’s ice-age prehistoric and can no longer be tolerated.

My colleague Heather Gann recently explored the 10 other water systems that service users in Jefferson County. Not one is even a fourth the size of BWW, which may only partially explain why they operate in relatively peaceful anonymity, unlike their Birmingham peers. Another explanation: “smart meters”—so named because they take the guesswork and inefficiency out of the process.

Many utilize the technology; some have been doing so for years. Trussville began installing them in 2008 and is exploring an update. “Humans make mistakes,” Trussville Utilities General Manager Mike Strength told Gann, adding: “A lot of times they’d go hide instead of reading meters and write something down. [With smart meters], all you’ve got to do is drive by and get the reading.”

Graysville installed them in 2019 and Superintendent (and Mayor) Clark Julio Davis told Gann it reads all 3,000 meters “in one day instead of 22 days”. He added: “[I] told [Birmingham that’s what they need to do, but they won’t listen.”

The BWW is currently billing about 98 percent of its customers, the audit revealed.

Johnson assumed the GM role in March 2019, after four months as interim following Underwood’s departure in December 2018. Johnson steadfastly resists details on the system’s past, such as why it took management months to alert the board and public of the billing fiasco.

“We’re in a good spot,” he said. “We do need to increase efficiency. This is one of the toughest years.”

None of this is at all meant to minimize or diminish the men and women tasked with reading our meters. Just the opposite. Last week, BWWB member Lucian Blankenship shared an experience during a ride-along with a meter reader. “As soon as we got out of the vehicle, a dog came charging at us,” he said.

The BWW has lost customers’ trust—at a crucial time when the system will likely hit us with a 3.9 percent rate increase. Before that’s done, and it’s all but inevitable, BWW should also strongly consider this: an amnesty and rebate. A re-set of all current “Implausible” bills with a credit of at least a significant portion of the disputed amount.

Call it a gesture towards rebuilding trust.

The BWW should also start listening to billing suggestions from neighboring systems, exploring best practices, i.e. Trussville’s “budget” billing systems that allows customers of at least a year to be billed predictably each month based on the prior year’s average monthly usage. “This program is especially helpful for our customers on a fixed income,” its website reads

And it must certainly get smart.

Related: Birmingham Water Works Board considering rate increase

I’ve only been regularly attending BWWB meetings for less than a year. In that time, no one has logically explained why the system does not utilize smart meter technology. Back in August, Woodfin said Johnson sought to recommend to the board a “request for proposal” for a high-tech system but was not allowed to do so. Johnson has not responded to my request for further illumination on this effort.

Last week, Munchus asked Underwood about BWW once seeking to have its meters aligned with Alabama Power, which uses smart meters. “They didn’t want to do it with us,” Underwood said.

I’ve heard projections citing the cost of installing smart meters as between $40 million and $50 million.

“Too expensive,” is often said, though not as loudly or often as customers shout about their bills.

Shouting as the table tumbles.

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Roy S. Johnson is a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary and winner of 2021 Edward R. Murrow prize for podcasts: “Unjustifiable”, co-hosted with John Archibald. His column appears in The Birmingham News and AL.com, as well as the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Press-Register. Reach him at [email protected], follow him at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj.