City Council - Regular Meeting

Number six. Wait, no, that's consent. Um, moving on to APUA consent calendar, approval of phase 2 census AMI implementation project. City manager. Yes, thank you, your honor. Uh, I think this is going to be our engineering department. Uh, Richard, are you on the line? Or Cavos, please. Yeah, come on in.

Honorable council, Mr. Mayor, your members of the public, the item in front of you is the is the next phase of the implementation of what's called the smart meters in the city of Atlanta. Um, in in 2022, the city of Atlanta entered into an agreement with uh with a company to install smart meters throughout all residential addresses in in our city. that allows us to move from manual reading of those meters into automated reading. It reduces the cost and it also delivers a a a you know increased transparency for our residents as as it relates to exactly how much their usage is. Use of such technology is is immense because a lot of platform can then be built upon it. There are cities out there that essentially allow you to see in live how much you you're you're using water at what times, what are the dates and so on and so forth. And it also allows us as a city to track potential leaks and and and set alerts for those. Um so the the the project was a little more complicated to begin with. There was a number of meters that were not working and so additional work was required. This second phase will complete the installation on all of those residential locations. And Richard Burgess from the engineering department is here to answer any questions.

I have a few. Well, I'll go last. Go ahead. Come. I I took the liberty. Yeah, you're welcome. I don't actually. I'm excited to see this. I I didn't realize it wasn't already done. So, I'm happy that we're getting back to it um and hopefully can complete it this time around. Thank you. I have no comments. MPT. No comments. No questions. Thank you, Mayor.

Um I guess my question is for the houses that do not currently have the smart meters, right? What are we doing if there's errors and they've overpaid over the course of time? So we won't be able to know if they've before what's happened previously with the smart meters. We won't be able to know just going forward with having the smart meters. We'll be able to accurately get the information in to accurately build them. One of the biggest issues is that we had 400 and something um dead meters in the city. They were meters that were not um accur accurately reading right. And so that's going to be the biggest effect is being able to change out those dead meters and put the AMI smart points on those. So now we're getting full accountability with all residential, commercial, or industrial um water user in the city is using um and originally the the original um contract I think was from like 2020, something like that. It was a while back ago. And so I've been pushing on getting this completed. Well, at the original at that original time, the quote was for what was in the city at that time, but since then, we've had a tremendous amount of growth. So, this um uh revision to to their contract is to put the uh the MXU Smart Points in all of the meters that currently do not have them with the original contract. Um, I guess the reason why I'm asking is I have, crazy enough, probably like in the last two months probably had like five maybe between like five and 10 residents

who year-over-year their bills water usage of has always been the same, right? But then the last month it just doubled

and there was no leak, there was no change of usage of water, nothing was different. but their bill doubled and they were in essence almost like forced to pay that, right? But my question is if we can't prove that there wasn't a water leak, if we can't prove that these things happened and we're we're forcing our residents to pay those services, right? Is there any way that we can apply like some type of credit if they can show us like if they can pull up, you know, three years worth of, you know what I mean? like water bells and and show like, hey, look, every October I'm only using

100 pounds of water, you know, however way it is that we measure it, right? And now I'm getting hit with 300. And nothing changed, right? No, no, no water leaks, no nothing. You know, I'm not saying that that's going to happen with hundreds and thousands of residents, right? But if we do have a case by case and they don't have the smart meter, can we implement something to assist those people?

We we can. I I know as far as on our side on the engineering side, we can investigate it and we could determine the cause of if if if there is a defect to the meter. So we could test the meters. There's the way it happens is the the water goes through this valve and it's like a you ever see those toys that you spin around on a table and it exactly and it goes through that and it keeps spinning. You see it in a meter. It goes like that. That's how it counts the revolutions and does all kinds of math to figure out the usage of water and then it goes to the building department. So, we can take a look at um at testing that meter to make sure that that the way it's reading is accurate. And if we determine that the meter is malfunctioned and whatever direction the city manager would like for us uh to go with, then we can definitely take that direction. But at least we can give that information to the city manager to let him know based off of what we investigated out in the field. We determined that that meter was malfunctioning during that time.

Got it. Thank you. Just wanted to see if we had something like that going on. All right. Going to go ahead and open up public comment here at 103. Going to go ahead and close public comment here at 103 and look for a motion. Second. All in favor? I I There's no items removed from the consent calendar. Our next regular meeting will be held No. U We're going dark in October. Correct. the 8th. Oh, just the 8th. So, we'll be back on the 22nd. I know. I'm sorry. I sent you a text. I tried I tried I tried to text you before. Um I know we don't have future agenda items listed. This is a quick special meeting, but I have a small if you don't mind. Um

in going through the the warrants today, um I realize that there are times we're providing lunch for staff that come in on Fridays. While that's not a policy and after talking to HR, it's probably not something we want to set as a policy. I'd like to see if we can bring just for discussion to give direction to council, I'm sorry, to staff um some sort of like unwritten rule that if the salaried folks are coming in on their day off to work that we do cover their lunch so that it's not a surprise so that there's a budget set aside for that and also so that when people ask like when I ask the question like people let me ask the question it's not like that sound like some mess, right? Okay. So, it doesn't need that necessarily be a policy, but just that we give them um uh direction and maybe even set aside some some some budget, some limit, some something so they can have lunch on their days off when they come in to do um special projects and to get caught up on things.

That's all I I'll second that. All in favor? I. All righty. And with that being said, our timeout is 104. Can I get a second? All in favor? I see