Last Straw With Tenant

Well the tenant finally pushed the final button with us this morning. She was already on thin ice due to not paying the late rent charges yet, and now the sewer bill fiasco is the latest (and LAST) thing.

When she first moved in, I gave her a list of utilities that she had to turn over to her name - one of which was the sewer. In this city, the sewer and water are billed by two different entities, however, they have an agreement whereby if one of the utilities is terminated then BOTH are terminated. The way the water company works is that the account is always in my name, but is temporarily transferred to the tenant when they move in and I fax over the request to the water company (which I did). However, the sewer was always confusing to me and I could never get a straight answer. For the last two tenants, they would open an account which would then put my account on "standby". This was always my understanding, and I found out it was correct - but with some caveats.

So, back to this tenant. We received a bill from the sewer office for service in September, so obviously the tenant never set up service. I stopped by to talk to her about it, along with picking up the October rent, on Oct 3rd. She paid me for the rent and reimbursing me for the sewer bill. I also gave her the form she needed to submit to the sewer office to open an account in her name. On October 27th, I had the chimney sweep go out to the house to clean the chimney. I was there to meet him, and asked the tenant about the sewer account. She said that she did it. I mentioned in a recent blog entry what occurred next - we received ANOTHER sewer bill, which turned out to be because she STILL hadn't set up sewer service. My wife called her and said she had until today (Thursday) to set up the account and pay the current bill, or we would cancel our account. IOW, she would HAVE to set up service if she wanted water, since the sewer and water companies have the agreement. Which leads us to today.

We hadn't heard from the tenant, so my wife calls the sewer office, and lo-and-behold, it is STILL in our name. However, she said the tenant left a them a message, which she still needs to return. The lady said that when she calls the tenant, she's going to tell her that service will be terminated tomorrow (including the water) and that she will have to come in and start the service in order to avoid that from happening. She said this occurs a lot with tenants and usually this will be enough to get them to come in, but I kind of doubt it with this one. She said I would have to come in tomorrow before 4pm to terminate the account in order for service to be disconnected on Friday, or else it will have to wait until Monday.

Fun fun.
Update: - Well it seems I'm confused for a reason regarding the sewer people as my wife has been on the phone with them and the water company, and neither seem to be on the same page. I'll spare the details, but suffice it to say that this will not be resolved anytime soon. It appears the water company can't just shut off the water due to Texas law, since the tenant is paid up with them. What they can do is have us terminate our account with the sewer people, and then the sewer office will send the water company (and tenant) a formal letter of default. They must give the tenant some time to come in and open an account, though, so it looks like the tenant will have until after Thanksgiving to open an account.