national multiple family submetering and allocation billing program ...

Perceived Concerns
In the resident survey, residents were asked their opinion on how they are billed for
water. For the impact properties, between 17 and 39% of the residents were dissatisfied. Please
refer to Figure 4.16 for complete results and Table 4.17 for the reasons for dissatisfaction, both
in Chapter 4. Some of these concerns are further discussed in this section.
A large concern for residents is how submetering or RUBS will affect their budget.
Paying separately for utilities such as electricity and other services is common (see Table 4.9),
but residents who have grown accustomed to not paying for water will need to start factoring
those bills into their monthly budget. In the case of submetering and RUBS, residents may end
up paying additional monthly service charges on their water bill. 33% of submetered and 16% of
RUBS properties were dissatisfied at least partly because of the service charge. It should be
noted that although service charges would also be present if the utility was submetering, there is
a key difference between utility and third party service fees. Utility billing, by law, must be cost
based – hence the service fees simply cover the costs of providing the water. Third party billing
is for profit and is not necessarily cost based. Regardless, with separate billing the total cost of
water is altered, and discrepancies may arise over how much, if at all, rent should be lowered
when residents start paying individual water bills. However, water and wastewater billing
programs are often introduced at lease signing or renewal, and owners can negotiate rent
independently from water and wastewater charges.
RUBS can raise a variety of concerns for residents. In the resident survey, the top five
issues for RUBS properties were: accuracy of reported water consumption (41.5%), paying for
other’s/complex (35.4%), rates (28.0%), not based on actual usage (18.3%), and other (47.6%).
With RUBS, the question of equity is often raised, since large volume users end up being
subsidized by lower volume users. These inequities are inherent in the allocation formulas
themselves. Simply because one dwelling unit is larger in terms of square footage does not
necessarily mean that its residents use more water. The underlying assumptions are not
universal, and there are always exceptions. Unmetered common areas such as lawns, laundry
rooms, and pools can be an issue when the volume used by these amenities is estimated. It has
also been found that when owners do pay for unmetered common areas, their estimates of usage
are often too low (Koplow and Lownie 1999). Hot water hybrids may be considered the
“fairest” of all allocation methods, since it is based on some actual consumption.
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