HOA that covers neighborhood’s water bills discovers it was paying someone else’s bill too

CHARLOTTE — It’s a story of two neighborhoods in Steele Creek. Bennington Place I and Bennington Place II are next to each other and similar, but separate.

Andrew Page lives in Bennington Place II. He told Action 9 investigator Jason Stoogenke that the way his community is structured, the Homeowners Association (HOA) pays the water bills for the whole neighborhood. He says he joined the HOA board a few months ago and it went over the books carefully. “We saw some really odd billing going on,” he said.

He says they noticed the community had been paying for two parcels that aren’t in their neighborhood, Bennington Place II, but are in Bennington Place I instead. “We paid somebody’s water bill,” he said.

He says it looked like the mistake had been going on for about two years and really added up.

“It was about $10,000,” he said. “You don’t budget for that. We weren’t thinking we needed $10,000 extra. That had come out of our savings account.”

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He says his neighborhood had some pressing projects and could have used that money.

“Everybody in the neighborhood has paid that so now there’s $10,000 down the drain,” he said.

The board reached out to Charlotte Water and city council members. The utility told Stoogenke it corrected the HOA’s account so this doesn’t happen again. Its policy is it will issue refunds going back three years, but it depends “on the situation.” In this situation, the utility wouldn’t say if it was giving Bennington Place II any money back, citing customer privacy.

Page says it isn’t. “I’m glad that they stopped billing us, but I feel that we are owed the 10,000 or so dollars,” he said. Stoogenke stresses the importance of really reading your bill. Don’t just glance over it. That way you can catch mistakes early. That’s fairly easy when it’s an individual account. It can get tricky when you have, let’s say, a church with multiple buildings or a situation like this with multiple units. It can be hard to pick up on errors.

Stoogenke tried to find out whose bills the HOA was accidentally paying and whether those property owners were paying too. Page doesn’t know. And, as said earlier, Charlotte Water won’t discuss specific accounts for privacy reasons.

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