SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — The San Diego Public Utilities Department gave raises of 32% to executives the past two years while customers were hit with double-digit rate increases, a Team 10 investigation has found.
Team 10 also found that rank-and-file workers are making 14% more than a year ago, and they are due another 7% raise by next summer.
Meanwhile, water rates have increased by about 16% in the past two years.
Team 10 also found that the agency finally began collecting large, unpaid bills following an investigation in April.
According to the City, one customer paid off a $1.4 million balance.
Bills can quickly accelerate because San Diego since 2018 adopted a no shut-off policy for those who don't pay because of on-going problems on whether bills for its 282,000-plus customer accounts were accurate.
Some customers tell Team 10 that their bills are still very late — or wrong by hundreds of dollars.
One of those customers is Peter Brydon, a software engineer.
He moved into his Sorrento Valley apartment in March 2021, but it took seven months to get his first bill, Brydon said.
"It was about $200. And, I was thinking, maybe they need more time," he said. "Maybe they will eventually get to me. And it just kept going on and on."
He then got six bills at once — but, he said, some months were missing.
Then things got curious.
"They were billing me over 220 gallons a day when I was in Germany," he said. "I checked with the leasing office. I don’t have any sprinklers on my unit. I have a single individual meter just for my apartment. That’s it.”
Brydon said when he contacted the San Diego Public Utilities Department, he was put on hold for an hour.
Eventually, he said he was told to make estimated payments.
Earlier this year, Team 10 uncovered similar billing problems across San Diego and that unpaid bills by customers for longer than four months had soared to $75 million.
Public Utilities Director Juan Guerreiro told Team 10 that some unpaid accounts exceeded $1 million.
He declined to be interviewed for this story.
After the Team 10 investigation in April, city officials told us the Water Department had collected partial payments from 20 customers who owed more than $100,000 each.
Their average water bill payment: $22,000.
City officials say the department continues to call customers with significant past-due balances.
A city spokesperson told us the department is developing a delinquency reduction strategy and hiring a new manager to run it.
The agency also manages pump stations, water storage facilities, reservoirs, treatment plants and thousands of miles of pipelines to deliver water.
As Team 10 followed through on the City's water bill problems, Team 10 used a public records request to find the City, gave big raises to its water department employees, and filled several executive jobs.
Team 10 found that while customers saw their water bills go up nearly 16 percent the past two years, some water department workers got raises double that amount.
At the top, Guerreiro's pay increased 27% to $279,000, records show.
Nicole Darling, a city spokeswoman, said Guerreiro is paid far less than his counterparts in California.
Team 10 found that five other directors, including those in San Francisco and Oakland, make a lot more than Guerreiro.
The pay difference for those two directors is more than $100,000, with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission chief making $422,443 a year.
Records show that in San Diego, under Mayor Todd Gloria, the Public Utilities Department filled nine director positions in the past two years.
The average pay for all 30 directors at the agency went up 32%, lifting their average pay to $222,743, records show.
Meanwhile, rank-and-file workers at the water department are getting 14 percent more than last year, and they are due another 7% raise by next summer.
Inflation during the last 12 months in San Diego was about 3.5%.
A City spokesman said using inflation as a benchmark is problematic because city employees were not given raises for nine years prior to 2019.
Further, a city official said salaries are set by the City's human resources and personnel departments, not by agency department heads.
Meanwhile, as the water department added nine executives, the agency only added five more customer service representatives in the past two years, records show.
A city spokesman said most of the rate increases were pass-through costs, but Team 10 found that about 30% of the increase went to water operations in the City.
"The department serves over 2.2 million wastewater customers and provides clean and safe drinking water to 1.4 million residents. Having a fully staffed management team is necessary to continue providing these essential functions and improving our service for residents," said Arian Collins, a water department spokesman.
San Diego officials say it takes about a half hour to reach a customer service representative.
Meanwhile, records obtained by Team 10 show that the average wait times in those five other communities that paid higher wages to top executives range from 6 1/2 minutes to 11 seconds.
Team 10 recently asked Mayor Gloria why the City hired so few people to help customers but provided big raises — especially to executives.
"We provided raises across the board for the City of San Diego," Gloria said. "Part of why those problems have not been solved is because people don’t want to come to work for the City of San Diego. Those customer service representative positions have been vacant for years and years. As we provide raises to public utilities department employees, we are starting to fill those positions.”
The City is in the process of filling 13 customer service jobs, but the mayor said more work needs to occur.
"I predict that it will take several more months before it gets to where I would like us to be," he said.
Brydon, a first-time renter, said he was stunned when Team 10 shared its findings with him.
"It shouldn’t be that expensive to add a customer service representative, though I know it’s a stressful job," Brydon said. "It would make it easier for me to actually call them.”
