City Power allegedly bridged meters ‘to investigate’
Bridging meters is illegal, but municipal workers allegedly guilty of implementing it.
Several residences’ electricity meters were taken out and their supply bridged, allegedly to allow City Power to ‘investigate’, some cases having been ‘investigated’ for three years and counting.
Bridging a municipal meter of any kind is, as far as the public knows, an unlawful thing. So much more it being bridged by municipal workers while they were sent out to investigate faulty meters. Residents of Watson Street thought, “Why not?”, when City Power officials offered to bridge them, allegedly to allow the entity to investigate and assess faulty meters before implementing a permanent solution. Visiting the street recently and finding many of the supply boxes open, the Record and Ward 85 councillor Carl Mann confirmed meters were absent from them. Instead, switches are mounted on pressed-wood boards, by which one can simply switch supply to residences on or off.
The danger, of course, is that residents of the street have not been paying municipal bills according to actual readings, but rather according to estimates. These estimates may be well below or well above what they should be paying, Mann said.
“Residents are also now scared that, once the municipality fixes its illegal connections in their road, they might receive massive bills,” he said.
“Future statements might claim they didn’t pay for electricity during the last couple of months, or paid too little, in which case large amounts will be reflected.
“The fact of the matter is this is an illegal measure and should be sorted out as a matter of urgency.”
The Record asked City Power officials, including its spokesperson Yumna Sheik, to comment on the matter, but instead she replied that a team was sent out a week after the fact to investigate. She didn’t respond to questions about the legality of the measure nor in what instances it is implemented, nor how long it is implemented for.
“Once we have concluded our investigations into the matter, I will provide the local media with an update,” she wrote in an email response.
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