Ferndale residents who haven’t paid their monthly bills for 3 years, finally receive termination notice
Johnny and Joan de bruyn receive termination notice 3 years after an incorrect water bill that caused them to decide to stop paying.
A Ferndale couple has finally received a termination notice exactly three years after paying their last monthly bill.
Johnny and Joan de Bruyn received an apparently erroneous statement of account in October 2020, where their water meter was read with an extra digit and they were charged R80 000 for water that month. The couple contacted the City of Johannesburg and followed up with them for a few months, and acquired reference numbers, but no investigation was ever done by the city.
The couple resolved to not pay their bills until it was sorted, and they are still waiting. The De Bruyns have borehole water and solar panels and could be entirely self-sufficient if the municipality were to disconnect their services.
“But we do not want to do that,” Joan said. “It does not sit right with me to have outstanding bills. If they can just correct the account balance, which is R200 000 in arrears now, we will happily pay what we really owe. We have the money saved to do so.”
Johnny said another reason they had not paid their bills was because they received advice that the city would not investigate the matter if they did. “Our next step is to go to the Joburg Ombudsman,” he said. “We will see if they can help with this mess. We even took meter readers here to look last year to see for themselves. There was no feedback after that. It is so frustrating.”
The house was built by Johnny about 42 years ago, and the borehole has been there for at least 110 years. During past water outages, the couple has provided water to the community.
Questions were sent to city spokesperson Dudu Lushaba on October 20 about whether the city will investigate this before disconnecting couple’s services, and what residents should do when they receive incorrect bills and all their phone calls and emails to the city are ignored.
No comment was received by the time of going to print.
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