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NILES -- When Brandy Hunyady's utility bills started arriving in the mail with numbers she could hardly believe, she got a power audit of her home and was told by her power provider not to pay the bill until they made sure it wasn't a problem on their end, she said.
Now, with a back balance of $4,000 and bills that have ranged as high as $1,700, and nothing from her power audit to explain the charges for her three-bedroom home on the border of Niles and Weathersfield, Hunyady said she isn't sure what to do next. All she can do is take a picture of her meter every day, organize her bills and compare them to the sometimes differing records the city provides access to online.
Hunyady gets her power from the city of Niles. She said she doesn't understand how her bill could have gone from a range of $200 to $300 a month to the wild variations she started seeing at the end of 2015 -- some months the bill is $4; her latest was $1,023, she said.
"They have been all over the place," Hunyady said.
Stephanie Ford, the city's billing manager said Feb. 17, "There is nothing wrong with the bills. There are just a few select people who think there is something wrong."
At the Jan. 4 City Council meeting, after another resident complained during public comments about the utility bills and the inconsistent billing cycles, Ford acknowledged there have been issues.
Ford said the city's shortage of meter readers and human error caused some problems. There are certain meter reader routes that seem to have problems routinely, Ford said. The shortage and retention of meter readers has also been a burden on the office, she said.
Ford said in January, even though the department is short-staffed, she prefers to give every customer a real reading because the estimations the billing software makes is always "ridiculously high or low."
She said she orders meters readers to reread the meters whenever there is a discrepancy, and anyone with problems can come in to talk about it.
At a community meeting Feb. 16, Hunyady was one of about 12 customers and their family members who gathered to air issues with their bills.
Carol Wolfe said sometimes she feels "held hostage" by the utility bills, especially because consumers aren't allowed to choose who they want to buy their power from.
Hunyady said she was trying to arrange a meeting with Mayor Tom Scarnecchia, who ordered a new meter for her home last year after hearing her complaints.
With five people in the household, three who are children, Hunyady said she doesn't see how any appliance the family has -- even if they were all on at once, and they aren't, she said -- could drive such high bills.
Sometimes the issue seems to be the billing cycle, Hunyady said. One of her bills had a 72-day billing cycle, she said.
Hunyady said there have been some months when her family had to decide between paying the mortgage or the utility bill.
"And it's like, what's the point of having power if I don't have a house?" Hunyady said.
But when she did choose her mortgage over the bill in January, the power was cut off, she said.
"I had to send my kids to their grandma's house for four days," Hunyady said.
The city has struggled with its utility billing for years. It has used several software companies and once tried outsourcing printing, and is still getting similar complaints about inconsistent billing cycles.