Martin Capozzi bought his brand-new Neptune condo in 2003 and started paying his JCP&L bill to keep the lights on. All was well for a few years, until he saw his bill suddenly spike.
He hadn’t made any major changes around the home, so he started asking around: Were his neighbors getting hit the same?
When he complained, Capozzi said a JCP&L employee told him: “Don’t worry about what your neighbors pay.”
But that’s exactly what he should have done: His neighbor had paid the lower bill the company should have sent to Capozzi. Over six years, he said he shelled out nearly $8,000 more than he should have.
The 61-year-old isn’t alone. About 50 people wrote complaints to the state Board of Public Utilities concerning crossed meters between 2015 and 2019. But there’s likely many more, experts estimate, from customers who either dealt directly with their energy provider or have yet to catch on to the switch.
The mix-ups tend to take place in apartment buildings and condos, where developers often install and group electric meters together. Sometimes, older residents pay a neighbor’s higher bills for years, the mistake only noticed by their adult children when they take control of the apartment.
Others get clued in when a neighbor moves and has the electric turned off, and the lights go dark in their own home.
None seem to be the fault of the homeowner, although they’re the ones who ultimately pay. The discrepancies have climbed as high as $20,000.
And these mistakes often have a two-fold fallout: The customer who overpaid likely won’t see a credit beyond the past six years, potentially losing the thousands of dollars paid in decades prior. And the under-payer can suddenly get slammed with thousands of dollars in back bills, as they’re forced to foot the credit to their neighbor.
The company’s reasoning? You used it, you buy it. Even if six years have passed since the electric coursed through their wires.
It’s part of a larger problem of utility companies getting away with mistakes, said Ismael Faustino, an auditor who deals with thousands of cases in the state each year where customers receive the wrong bills due to poor readings, meter mix-ups and other issues out of their control.
“I think the utility companies became too lackadaisical about their responsibility,” Faustino said. “I think the [Board of Public Utilities] should be a little bit more responsible in demanding that the utility companies resolve the disputes of the clients.”
Out thousands of dollars, with no hope of a refund
Many customers resolve smaller cases concerning just a few years or few hundred dollars with a phone call to the utility company or a complaint to the Board of Public Utilities, and companies often send credits or adjusted bills to each household, according to records obtained by NJ Advance Media through an Open Public Records Act request. But for the cases that date back to 2014 or earlier, it seems there’s never a full resolution.
According to New Jersey Administrative Code, utility companies must keep records for six years, and “may choose to keep records longer than six years in order to facilitate compliance with the rules regarding adjustment of charges for meter error.”
But they don’t have to keep those records.
In 2018, NJ Advance Media reported the story of John Regina, a man who received the wrong bill for 24 years. JCP&L offered him a credit of $6,300 for the six years between 2012 and 2018, but he estimated the company owed him as much as $25,000. He did not respond to a request for comment as to how the company ultimately handled his claim.
Alyse Liebowitz found herself suddenly facing a nearly $4,000 JCP&L bill last year, after her neighbor uncovered a crossed meter situation at her late father’s condo. JCP&L withdrew the money from Liebowtiz’s account immediately, before setting her up on a payment plan, she said.
She settled with JCP&L in April, agreeing to pay $2,800, she said. But when her next bill came, she saw $109.43 remained on top of the settled amount she had given the company.
She’s still disputing that leftover sum, only paying new charges.
“They don’t even deserve that,” she said of the settlement money. “It was their mistake to begin with. It was their problem in the first place.”
The daughter of Liebowitz’s neighbor, Jane Gentile, ultimately got JCP&L to cut her a check after three months of back and forth. But again, that only went back six years. She said she estimates her father had paid the wrong bill since 1994.
“Where is the justice for this mistake that was no fault of his own?” Gentile said.
Dolores Noboa, a woman who does not live in a condo, found herself dealing with a different issue: the misclassification of her home. Like many others, she brought up the high bill to JCP&L and her neighbor, seeking an explanation for her rate.
“They’d say, ‘It is what it is, you must have something in the house,'” she said. “Nobody bothered to look into it and check, or mention it was signed up as a business account.”
A representative eventually noticed the business designation and sent a worker out to verify that Noboa’s home, nestled a quarter-mile back into the woods on a private lane in Hunterdon County, was indeed not a business.
She estimates her bill has dropped by about $30-$50 a month. Again, JCP&L told her they only had to backtrack six years, and offered her a bill credit of around $450, she said.
But she estimates JCP&L could have overcharged her by more than $10,000 over 20 years. She has refused to settle and continues to fight.
“I haven’t gotten a penny back,” Noboa said.
“It’s not like it was an error on a machine, it was something that you physically did, and you had that information all along,” she said. “I shouldn’t be penalized for that.”
JCP&L is the state’s second largest energy provider, with 1.1 million customers. PSE&G services the most homes at 2.3 million, while the smaller providers, Atlantic City Electric and Rockland, have 540,000 and 72,000 customers, respectively.
One 2018 complaint obtained through the records request came from an Atlantic City woman who was billed from the wrong meter and suddenly owed $4,000 to Atlantic City Electric. A Cliffside Park woman got a refund for $15,000 for the years her parents’ paid the wrong bill to PSE&G, but complained that the refund only covered six years, not the dozen in which they lived in the apartment.
A Barnegat man who caught the mixed meter within a year had another question for JCP&L in his complaint: “Who will contact and correct the previous tenants over the last 20 years? It is ridiculous that such a thing happened for so long. Are JCP&L truly honest in their calculations?”
No complaints obtained by NJ Advance Media named Rockland.
Peter Peretzman, a spokesman for the Board of Public Utilities, said the board may work with customers to resolve their issues, playing the middleman between them and their company.
“The circumstances of each case are different and there is no one way in which they are resolved,” he said.
Peretzman said there have been some cases where the board “ordered” the utility to refund or credit the customer’s bill if they overpaid. Staff at the board may also set up payment arrangements for those who companies seek to back-bill, he said.
But the board has not penalized any companies for meter mix-ups.
“As the utilities and the customer have resolved the issue in these cases, there have not been any formal cases where the Board issued penalties,” he said. “If, however, the parties failed to reach agreement, the customer would have the option of filing a formal petition at which point the matter would be transmitted to the Office of Administrative Law for adjudication.”
A public records request of every Office of Administrative Law decision between 2015 and 2019 regarding mixed meters yielded only one decision. In it, a Lakewood man was hit suddenly with a $897 JCP&L bill after underpaying for three years. The office ruled the customer must pay it back.
What should customers do?
While it seems unfair, the companies are playing by the rules. It’s the rules that are the problem, some say.
Faustino, the auditor, said he believes the six-year protection for companies should be written out of the administrative code, allowing customers to get their full refunds and forcing companies to keep records longer. As cases linger and sometimes take two or three years to sort out, that six year back date keeps moving forward, allowing more incorrect charges to pile up.
He also said the code should put the responsibility for incorrect readings on companies rather than customers.
So what’s a condo owner facing a questionable bill to do?
The Board of Public Utilities mandates that those who believe their meters are not reading properly “have the right to have your meter tested, free of charge, once a year by your utility.”
But according to the complaints, many people said they had called the electric company multiple times about billing issues and spoke to several representatives before finding the source of their problem. Several people told NJ Advance Media they had to contact JCP&L multiple times before getting any clarification about the mixed meters.
According to JCP&L’s handbook, the meter “is installed and maintained by the customer, at the customer’s expense, and in the condition required by the insurance providers, governmental authorities having jurisdiction, and Company requirements," making the meter their responsibility.
The problem is, people rarely install their own meters or know the easy ways they can get mistaken.
Customers can test the meters themselves, simply by shutting off the one marked for their unit and seeing if their lights go out. But they first have to have suspicions their bills are too high or too low.
If the meter check or calls to a company do not find the problem, they can contact an auditor familiar with the many ways billings might go wrong.
There may be one set of rules, but companies tend to handle them differently.
Deann Muzikar, a spokeswoman for PSE&G, said the company will credit residential customers for up to six years of overpayment stemming from a meter mixup, but would not go after the customer with a cheaper bill for the difference. But they do cut off the refund at the six-year mark.
JCP&L spokesman Cliff Cole said the company “follows all the appropriate New Jersey Board of Public Utilities regulations and the Company’s BPU-approved tariff provisions related to billing adjustments on customers’ accounts."
In doing so, “the company will perform billing adjustments to correct billing errors once discovered. In the event ‘mixed meter’ issues are found, JCP&L makes efforts to correct the billing for the customers impacted, going back for up to six-years from when the billing error is discovered.”
Atlantic City Electric works with customers on a case-by-case basis in the meter mix-ups, said Frank Tedesco, a spokesman for the company. They refund or credit customers if warranted, he said.
“It’s important to understand that many meter mix-ups are due to improperly marked or unmarked meter sockets,” he said. “Meter sockets are customer-owned property, and the customer is responsible for installing, labeling, repairing or replacing the meter socket at their residence. While a meter-mix up is generally a rare occurrence, we often find instances of improperly marked meter sockets or third-party personnel, such as electricians or contractors, removing our meters and reinstalling them in the wrong meter socket.”
It’s not clear how each complaint sent to the board ended. Many of the records, indicating the complaints have been closed, show a trail of unreturned calls to customers, while others note billing adjustments made within the six-year time frame.
JCP&L first offered Capozzi a credit for about $7,800, but that only goes back to 2013. In early February, he said he received a check from a wire service for the amount.
But he still has a pending complaint to get the bill corrected for the other 10 years that has dragged on throughout the year, with delays and virtual court dates.
As for his neighbor, she’s on the hook for the difference, paying about $85 a month on top of her bill for the next few years, he said.
“I’m not trying to be greedy. If I never said anything, then, oh well, that’s on me,” Capozzi said. “But to complain all this time? I thought for sure when I figured it out JCP&L would be like, ‘oh wow, we’re really sorry, here’s your money.’ But this has been a fight the whole way.”
Amanda Hoover can be reached at ahoover@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @amandahoovernj. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
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