C.D. Reimer

Bad enough that my apartment complex became pet-friendly a few years ago, granting the neighbors and their “small” dogs permission to piddle on my front doorstep in the hallway. Now my neighbors are dumping their smelly trash bags in the elevator foyer, expecting someone else to haul their garbage out. Since the sewer-and-garbage bill was no longer part of the rent, and the leasing office re-branded this 1960’s housing project as luxury apartments, maybe the neighbors want maid service. A laser-printed sign went up in the foyer: “TAKE TRASH OUTSIDE – NO TRASH IN HALLWAY!”

Not surprisingly, someone trashed the no trash sign. Colorful words in blue pen filled out the blank areas. Corners of the page got ripped off, as if someone needed paper to write a phone number in a hurry. The sign got ripped up into small pieces and scattered around the foyer like dead mice from a cat. Someone did get the message. The smelly trash bags stopped appearing in the hallway.

A bigger trash problem happened outside at the dumpsters around the complex, as overflowing construction debris—mostly 2×4’s and drywall from a remodeling—appeared during the summer nights. This is the most expensive type of garbage to get rid of in Santa Clara County. The maintenance guys had to break it up and move it by wheelbarrow over to their own dumpster behind a locked chain-link fence. A waste of time and money for everyone involved.

One night I heard a loud boom out in the parking lot. Looking out my balcony door, I saw a construction truck backed up to the dumpsters and someone tossing construction debris into the dumpsters. If I had a camera that could take good pictures at night, I would have gone outside and taken pictures for the leasing office to file a police report. I did talk to the maintenance guy breaking up the debris the next morning. He couldn’t understand why no one living in the apartment building behind the dumpsters reported anything. Their line-of-sight of the person and the license plate on the truck was better than mine across the way.

The leasing office didn’t put up any laser-printed signs to stop the illegal dumping. The maintenance guys built walls and a gate around each set of dumpsters. That stopped the dumping of construction debris. The neighbors, however, continued to ignore the posted sign on what can and cannot go into the garbage and recyclable dumpsters, dumping their smelly trash into the nearest dumpster or on the ground.

The familiar “POP!” sound from outside of my apartment on a hot summer day meant that the power transformer out on the street gone kablooey, plunging the complex into a brownout that produces enough power to run small appliances and flickering lights, turning on the hallway emergency lights in the hallways (if the batteries weren’t dead), and making the filter in my fish tank gurgle loudly in protest. This time around my apartment suffered a brownout that affected only the kitchen and the bathroom. Poking my head out into the hallway, the overhead lights were still at full power. No flickering lights or dead batteries. It didn’t make sense.

After checking the circuit breakers, my initial assumption was that one-half of the circuit breakers went bad. This happened shortly after I moved into my apartment nearly nine years ago, where the circuit breakers for the kitchen went bad and the maintenance guy replaced them. Fortunately, this assumption was wrong. The power came back on 90 minutes later. A PG&E truck drove around the complex to check out the power meters in the outdoor utility boxes.

Why did the brownout affect one-half of the circuit breakers?

The answer that made sense was that one-half of the circuit breakers were on a separate power circuit. The maintenance crew enlarged the utility boxes around the power meters earlier this year, allowing PG&E to replace the analog power meters with newer digital power meters. If the apartments got wired with two main lines running into each circuit breaker box, one of the main lines got re-wired to a different path to the power grid.

The construction work done within the complex over the last few years had to do with running utility lines through the emergency back entrance. When the complex got built in 1969, the utility lines ran from the street in front and represented a single-point of failure. When I lived in my apartment during the early years, an outage that required a major repair job to the utility lines affected the entire complex. One winter I had to endure five days without running water and took showers at the gym. That doesn’t happen anymore.

The apartment complex now has dual utility lines that make a single-point of failure less inconvenient. Well, almost. I can get used to enduring one-half of a brownout, especially if it impacts the part of the apartment I’m not using at the time. The water pressure in the bathroom is strong, consistent and tastes great, but the water pressure in the kitchen is weak, inconsistent and taste like a rubber hose.

When I first moved into my apartment almost eight years ago, I didn’t have to pay for the water, sewage and garbage. As the Great Recession lingered on, the new residents had to pay for those services and existing residents were “grandfathered” from paying. That changed last year. I wasn’t happy to pay an extra $60 USD per month, especially with a nickel-and-dime utility billing company (i.e., a $2.50 USD “convenience” fee for paying by credit/debit card).

I mailed a check immediately after receiving the bill in the mail because that was FREE. On the few occasions that my check was “late” (it wasn’t) and my account was hit with a $15 USD late charge, I talked the leasing office into rescinding the late charge. After the paper bill failed to show up in the mail for two months in a row, I sent off letters to start the document chain to file a complaint with the department of consumer affairs. I eventually gave in to paying the damn the convenience fee to avoid the monthly hassles I was going through with the leasing office.

These utility billing companies fall into a legal gray area where they aren’t regulated by the state and local laws, can nickel-and-dime consumers every which way, and use the threat of eviction to encourage prompt payment. The first time I saw the notice that I was behind on the utilities (the paper bill went “missing” in the mail) that threatened eviction taped on the door for everyone to read, I was pissed me off. The leasing manager promised to change the language of the notice since an eviction wouldn’t happen until after the second or third warning for non-payment. The notice was never changed.

I found a new notice on my door that the leasing office was changing utility billing companies. Tenants will no longer have to pay a convenience fee for using their credit/debit card, and can pay the utility bill with their rent at the leasing office. The new billing company wasn’t in the nickel-and-dime business. That was a good change for everyone at the complex. And then I read the next to last paragraph on the notice.

The leasing office reserved the right to apply payment to any unpaid utility bill balance first and the rent balance second. If your check doesn’t cover everything, the utility bill will get paid first, the remainder towards rent and a $150 USD fee for failure to pay the rent in full. This is the same tactic that the banks used to generate overdraft fees by paying the checks first and applying deposits last before Congress put an end to such abusive practices.

Unlike these utility billing companies, the leasing office does fall under state and local laws. I’ll see how this situation plays out before I start writing letters to elected officials and government agencies. This nickel-and-dime business to generate extra income at someone else’s expense has to come to an end.