Lately I’ve been going crazy over the haphazard system of billing water users in Yonkers.

In my regular print and online column, I’ve tried to explain why rate payers are getting “hosed” with outrageously high bills—that it’s the city’s catching up to what’s actually owed after years and years of only estimating the bills. People who may have been billed, say, $40 or $50 biannually, were suddenly shocked with “actual” bills of several hundred or thousands of dollars.

This is bad enough. But since I started writing about this, I’ve gotten a number of calls and e-mails from people who have reported something that makes this SNAFU even more disturbing.

And that is, if you continually harrangue the city water department about your bill, they will arbitrarily knock a few bucks off the bill, presumably to get you off their backs. For example, a widow on a fixed income told me how upset she was to get a bill for about $480, and after complaining about it to officials they “discounted” her by $40. She had no idea how they arrived at that number and though she still thought her bill was too high, she finally caved in and paid the lower amount.

This throws the whole system into question. What about people who don’t fight the bill. Are they paying too much?

Are municipal rates merely negotiable starting points and who’s making these decisions?

But that’ not all. A lawyer told me that he did a closing for a client who was selling a house in Yonkers. The title report said there was a lien for unpaid water for more than $5,000. He told his client to get a reading and it came to $170! How can there be such a discrepancy?
Worse than that, it turned out the man overpaid his real estate taxes and the city wouldn’t credit him the overpayment but told him to fill out a form and wait to get the money refunded.

This is why the city ought to be audited.