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Landlords press Dell Rapids officials over water-meter outage
Summary
Landlords and property managers told the Dell Rapids City Council that a remote meter-reading outage in late November left them manually monitoring dozens of tenant meters and exposed residents to potentially large bills; city staff cited a failed antenna and said Badger support responded and the city will pursue better bill transparency and redundancy options.
Landlords and property managers urged Dell Rapids officials on Dec. 2 to address a recent outage in the city's remote water-meter system that left multiple multiunit properties without automated leak alerts.
"I cannot stand there and look at over 120 toilets every day," said David Schmidt, a landlord who spoke at the meeting. Schmidt described finding a toilet leak and then losing the system's online alerts when the city's readings stopped updating in mid- to late November. Courtney Walters, who manages several rental units, told the council she and others had been told to monitor meters daily while the system was down.
City staff said the issue stemmed from a failed antenna — the gateway that aggregates many meter reads — and that the city's visibility fell to the small number of meters still transmitting directly. "There was a map that would pull up and there'd be red flags," a utilities staff member said, explaining how the previous dashboard highlighted problem accounts; staff added that support from Badger and on-site assistance were used to diagnose the fault and that the outage was identified around Nov. 24-25.
Council members and staff discussed short-term and longer-term options, including drive-by reads, vetting alternative vendors, or installing an on-site antenna that would cost substantially more. Staff said a drive-by option would likely be cheaper than a permanent on-site antenna but would not provide daily reads. The council instructed staff to explore redundancy and clearer ways to notify affected customers while repairs continue.
