My municipal account headache – what is yours?

It takes a lot to rile me, but today, after the fourth conversation with someone at the City of Jo’burg about my electricity account, I finally lost it.

The first three conversations were to investigate why my bills were unrealistically high. The final one was to tell me I would be cut off for not paying an outstanding amount of R29 562 that had materialised in the last month.

Upon investigation, it was determined that a new smart meter was at the heart of the problem. Instead of merely sending meter readings to my account – which is why it’s called a smart meter – it was estimating the cost of my electricity at almost double the actual reading!

The City of Jo’burg call centre could not explain why the meter had not been linked to the account, and referred me to City Power.

City Power confirmed that the meter had still not been linked (15 months after being installed), noting that they “have made a ticket to sort this out”. This was within the last two weeks.

Then, yesterday, I received a call from the City of Jo’burg urging me to pay my account or have my services turned off.  I am speechless about the poor communication, bad implementation and inability to sort out these issues.

I was told this was something that could not be solved on the phone and if I was not prepared to make immediate payment, I would need to go to the closest walk-in centre to sort it out - clearly designed to push me to pay the bill and sort out the detail later.

I would love to hear about your bad experiences with municipal services of any kind. FTW will try to follow up on some of these and at least provide a platform for business people to vent their frustration. I would also like to hear about any ideas to make the system better.
Send your stories and thoughts to mystory@nowmedia.co.za

If there is a caring municipal official who would like to help us run through some of these and to clear up any questions, please contact me through the mystory@nowmedia.co.za email address.

Anton Marsh – Publisher: Freight & Trading Weekly

A copy of the utilty bill received: