Atlanta panel backs three-month power to settle old water bills

Atlanta’s proposal to give watershed officials broad discretion over disputed water bills has won unanimous committee backing, with full Council consideration listed as pending Oct. 19 at 1 p.m. Five City Utilities Committee members supported the measure as amended Oct. 13. That recommendation is not final approval.⁠[1]

Ordinance 26-O-1564, sponsored by Councilmembers Dustin Hillis and Liliana Bakhtiari, would let the watershed commissioner or a designee adjust single-family residential accounts “for any period of time, in any amount,” subject to the commissioner’s discretion and established operating procedures. The text attached to the minutes sets the authority’s duration from Nov. 1, 2026, through Jan. 31, 2027.⁠[1]

The distinction matters: those three months limit when officials could act—not how old a disputed bill could be. The proposed ordinance sets no dollar ceiling, but it creates no automatic entitlement to forgiveness.⁠[1]

The authority is tied to the Flexible Levels, Options, & Affordable Terms initiative, or F.L.O.A.T. The legislation describes help bringing accounts current, resources for customers facing financial challenges and possible field-service requests to correct meter or billing problems. Resolving concerns in one interaction is its stated aim, not an established result.⁠[1]

How individual adjustments would be decided remains unresolved in the ordinance. It requires operating procedures but does not reproduce them, specify what evidence customers would need, explain how adjustment amounts would be calculated or identify which decisions would require supervisory review.⁠[1]

There is also an unresolved amendment. The draft minutes record the amendment vote without explaining what changed. The operative sections attached to the minutes match those in the pre-meeting packet, including the adjustment authority and expiration date. Those written records therefore do not establish the amendment’s substance.⁠[1][2]

An Aug. 6 city audit shows the broader financial stakes: auditors counted $236 million in delinquent water and sewer balances across 60,168 accounts as of April 2026. Those are not October totals or a measure of balances eligible for FLOAT. The audit included all account statuses and property classes, including disputed accounts; the proposed authority applies to single-family residential accounts.⁠[1][3]

The audit also reiterated an earlier recommendation for supervisory-review thresholds and restricted access for a billing-adjustment category called “A-bill.” Watershed Management told auditors it was addressing earlier recommendations, although the report said implementation progress had not yet been reported. The pending ordinance’s reference to operating procedures does not establish which safeguards would govern FLOAT adjustments—or what any particular customer would receive.⁠[1][3]