“Fast forward 12 months and now they’re charging us $1,200 for 12 months of water bills.”

Photo by Miki Jourdan

“Dear PoPville,

When we moved into our last home we provided our landlord with all the information to transfer DC Water over to our new account. They never did that and told us not to worry about it (which we have in writing). We interpreted that as, we aren’t paying for water. We never received a bill from them so we assumed that was also their interpretation. Turns out their interpretation was the bill would just stay in their name and they would bill us. Fast forward 12 months and now they’re charging us $1,200 for 12 months of water bills.

I assume because of COVID they just weren’t getting billed and because the city wasn’t shutting off utilities they forgot to bill us in turn.

While our lease stipulates the tenant pays utilities, this can’t be a reasonable expectation. Anyone else ever experience something like this?”