A house in our neighborhood is undergoing foreclosure. Yesterday, a neighbor saw a new notice posted on the front door of the home and decided to take a look. It was a water shutoff notice from Seattle Public Utilities. The homeowner owes $13,000 in unpaid water bills (plus $110 shutoff charge).
I’m wondering why SPU waited so long before turning off the water. That bill is equivalent to decades worth of normal household water use.
When the house is sold, they won’t turn the water back on until the bill is paid…. (I know because there was an unpaid bill on our house too – fortunately it was no where near that large). I had to go downtown to the actual office and pay the bill plus a fee to reinstall the meter before they’d turn the water back on. There was also a HUGE unpaid sewer/garbage bill (I think it was years worth – I don’t think they can cut off your garbage pickup) that we had payment of as a condition of closing.
If you knew the house was going to be forclosed, and you just turned EVERY water outlet on full, I wonder if you could hit that in a couple months??
Wow, that’s crazy talk.
That is, several properties could have that house listed as their billing address for the water bill. We lived in an apartment that had that happen – the bill seemed impossibly large, but it turned out to be the address of record for all the properties managed by a single property management company (which was in the process of going out of business).
why do we care?