If you don’t have a digital water meter, you’ll soon receive a postcard in the mail with instructions on how to schedule an appointment to get one installed.
As Forest Park transitions 3,180 commercial and residential manual water meters to digital ones, replacement work around the village will start within the next month after a delay with the company that will read and store data from the meters.
The village council approved three payments for its water meter replacement project at the Aug. 11 meeting, a cost that totaled about $415,000 to Veregy Central. The company is contracted to do the work for more than $3.8 million, over $1.8 million of which had been paid ahead of the last council meeting.
Sal Stella, director of public works, said the amount approved at the meeting is back payments owed for completed work. He said the payments were delayed after Sensus — which will store meter readings in its cloud and transfer them daily over to the customer portal — was bought out by its parent company Xylem. In the transition, there was paperwork that never got submitted to the state, compromising the village’s service agreement with Sensus.
Stella said the village’s attorney flagged the error, and there was a stop-work order until the paperwork was set straight. Because Xylem is in good standing with the state, Stella said the company changed the service agreement with the village to be under its name instead so that work could continue.
“While this stop-work order was going on, the bills were stopped. Once everything started going again, that’s when all the bills started getting paid again,” Stella said of why there were three payments approved to the lead contractor at the last council meeting. The delay also affected the installation of the water meters. “We couldn’t install the water meters because they wouldn’t be able to read them.”
Now that work is back on again, the village is sending out postcards in the mail that instruct residents on how to schedule a date to get a digital water meter installed. Stella said the public works department will start installing water meters within the next month.
“After a short delay, we’re getting that work up and running and implemented in the village. It’ll be a benefit for residents and make the village more efficient and effective,” Commissioner Michelle Melin-Rogovin said at the Aug. 11 council meeting during discussion about the three water meter project payments.
The village began replacing manual water meters in 2000, starting with those that were degrading or faulty. The public works department replaced them with meters that have a wireless system. So instead of walking up to manual water meters to read them, as had been done for decades, workers could read the meters by driving around town and not leaving their truck.
About 35% of the village’s water meters currently have digital displays, while the rest are manual meters. Stella previously told the Review that he expects the whole village will have digital meters by the end of the year.
The digital water meters that will soon be installed will be read through a radio signal from an antenna. This allows staff to monitor water usage from village hall, and for customers to monitor their water usage through a portal.
While village staff say residents may see a slightly higher bill with the newest round of water meters, they will also have more transparency around their water usage through the customer portal.
The portal will “eventually allow users to be able to access their water meter usage and hopefully will allow people to have a better idea of how they’re using water,” Village Administrator Rachell Entler said at a council meeting in February. “They won’t have to wait until we do billing to realize they may have a water leak somewhere in their house.”
