County Department of Water Resource

This is what i have found from back of my water bill...

Important notice to department of water resource customers
1. Payment must be received prior to due date. Payments not received will be considered delinquent and subject to a disconnection and /or collection fee.
2. Failure to receive bill does not exempt you from payment, late charges, or disconnect.
3. The due date on this bill is for your current charges only. All forwarded charges are considered past due and are subject to a 10% Late fee.
4. A $30.00 service charge or five percent of the face amount, whichever is greater, of the returned item will be applied to all returned checks, drafts, or orders.
5. A $50.00 service charge is applied on all collection activities.
6. It is the responsibility of you, our customer, to ensure we have access to all water meters.

My Story:
I recently have case when i have moved to my new house.... Thank you for your good wishes.... where i have not received water bill for a few months. being new house owner in this country was not sure how frequent bill comes... it's OK to call me idiot, but in my defense, In third world country like India, where I had my child hood water bill comes once a year. They call it Water Tax. I think they have yet to figure out that you can charge for water every month like advanced country like USA. (hope they don't read this and decide to implement)

Any way, one fine day i have looked in my USPS mail box - a notice waiting for me to open, stating They have not received my payments for water bill and my connection is scheduled to disconnect.

What the F*** , pardon my french, i said to myself, i have never received any other communication from county and this is what they send me directly... So i have decided to talk to Customer No Service department of County water department, after 2 hours of music, i have decided it's not going to work, and decided to go to next town and talk to someone in person instead.
Surprisingly My wait time in line was under 5 minutes... Happily i went to counter, on expense of my back, kneeling before the almighty Clark, so that he can listen through that small hole made in thick glass partition between him and the subjects, try to make case that i have not received any water bill until now - can you please remove at least the late fees. He was kind enough to look in to the computer screen, and found that they have record that USPS have returned all bills to them stating can not deliver with no other explanation why they can not put mail in my mail box. And he referred me the same thing mentioned in that important notice on the back of the water bill stated as item 2. And i have to suck it up and pay all late fees.

My views:
I have no way to know, if County really have mailed me water bill. I have no way to know if USPS have received mail from County water department with correct address. I have no way to know what USPS did with my emails. Only thing i know is, what water department told me, USPS has returned my mail stating - can not deliver to my mailbox which is standard USPS approved mailbox, where USPS has kept delivering all other mails and lots of Junk.

County Department of Water Resource is a Government run service, USPS is government run service, If government can not provide me a water bill, its still my fault and i am obliged to pay for late fee for there inability to provide services. Because i should know that water bill comes every month, why it didn't come this month? Right?

Now change the scenerio, it happened with my Kohl's Charge card. I am set with them to send me e communication. for some reason i didn't receive one month's statement in email, and next month in my email it came with late fees, I called them, same argument, she was happy to remove late fees, did it over phone, wait time under 2 minutes. Email may have been lost anywhere, may be their system didn't send it, may be it went to junk filter, may be i have received and ignored it or deleted it accidentally without realizing it or with purpose... Who knows... But they did it for me...

Think Why the difference... Let me help you... I have choice to go to million other cards to use, i have no option to use other water resources, unless i got it checked what is the water level where I live and make water well for myself and than do all filtering and purifying for my water. and for that too have to take permission from government...

Some more comments:
Item 1: Why Payment must be received prior to due date? - Why not it must be postmarked before due date? They can tell you - they didn't receive, But for sure, they can not argue postmark. Post mark is in my control, i can stand in line and make sure postal employee post mark in front of me. i can not control when they receive. Unless obviously you have time to travel to next town and pay in person.

Item 2: The whole article is about this

Item 3, 4 and 5 - Talking about financial charges by banks, look at what government is charging you...
10% late fees - interest rate is bellow 5% since year 2000, currently its like 0-0.5%.
30$ service charge may be for $50 water bill for returned checks....
$50 service charge for collection for $50 water bill

Water and Health-care
Recent Days / Months, there is big discussion going on for the health care reform, where many people including me thinks, that this is step towards single payer system or government run health-care to go to the extreme. People in favor argue that health-care is human-right, mixing heath-care and health-care insurance.

I want to ask this Food, Water, Air are three basic necessities of survival of human, if Government can deny you water unless you pay IN-TIME. what is the assurance that the same will not deny you the health-care if you are unable to pay for it, especially when you have no other choice left.
Something to think about....

For now - my solution for water problem:
I have send them a Voided check in USPS mail, with paper form that they have kindly provided on their website, with my account number, bank routing etc. and authorized them to do something called auto-debit. Auto-Debit is the risk i had to take, providing and trusting government with my financial data, which can be misused. Not believing me, ask people whose last penny is taken by IRS from their bank account without permission.

So for now i am free from USPS mishaps at least. I hope they never tell me we have not received my payment for their own inability to even auto-debit. I will deal with it when it happens.

* $50 water bill is the avg water bill for my household at rate charged by my county