Vic Bianes

The city of San Diego has hired a new director for its Public Utilities Department, NBC 7 has learned.

Big changes continue for San Diego’s Water Department, a department that has struggled to regain customer trust after more than a year of audits and internal investigations. Top San Diego city managers presented those changes to the city council’s audit committee on Wednesday. “We’ve developed a standard operating procedure which we did not have before for monitoring customer complaints...

A former San Diego Water Department Supervisor tells NBC 7 Responds and Voice of San Diego that employees were blamed for management’s problems.

Workers for the Division responsible for water meter box repairs worked 3.6-hours but were paid for a full eight hour day.

Responding to a wave of water billing complaints, San Diego’s Public Utilities Department vowed to re-read all water meters by this week.

The City Auditor has said in addition to reviewing billing practices, his agency will also be reviewing customer service at the Public Utilities Department and whether or not any improvements need to be made.

At a city council committee hearing, water department officials said they still do not know what is causing the unexplained spikes in water usage but are making changes, including installing a new “state of the art” meter testing system.

Following an admission by San Diego city water officials Thursday that a water meter-reader employee was responsible for hundreds of customers being overcharged, NBC 7 Responds is still questioning if the water department retrofitted newly installed smart meters.

NBC 7’s Ashley Matthews spoke to homeowners outside of the city’s investigation zone who claim they were overcharged, too.

Homeowners dozens of miles away from the zones the city investigated claim they also saw a spike, and are wondering how widespread the problem really is.

Public Utilities Department Director Vic Bianes said his agency investigated 3,000 meters in the Carmel Valley, Mira Mesa, Rancho Bernardo and Rancho Penasquitos neighborhoods and found 343 readings in the November/December billing periods were misread.