The Altoona Water Authority on Thursday approved a policy change that will almost halve a $6,000 retroactive customer bill the authority charged recently to make up for a prior clerical error — after the customer’s mother complained about the charge.

Instead of invoicing the full amount that customers would owe when the authority discovers an inadvertent undercharge, the new policy calls for customers to pay only for the unbilled fixed costs of making water service available — with nothing added for any amount of water used in connection with the retroactive bill.

Charging his mother $6,000 all at once for sewer service delivered since 2003 because the authority failed to include that charge on her bill for all those years is simply unfair, said Paul Amigh.

“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should,” Amigh told the board. “If this was your mother, what would you do?”

He didn’t expect the authority would forgive the entire amount, Amigh said.

Rather, he was hoping that the members would settle for a “reasonable amount,” he said.

His mother is retired, recently had open heart surgery and lives on a fixed income, he said.

She’d been paying her water bills all along, and it wasn’t her fault that the authority neglected to include sewer charges, unbeknownst to her, he said.

A recent letter from the authority included an added administrative fee, which seemed like gratuitous “punishment,” he said.

The authority was demanding full payment by Sept. 1, and that provided insufficient time, he said.

If she were to pay $25 a month for the rest of her life, it probably wouldn’t complete the repayment, he said.

What would the authority do after that — put a lien on her house, he asked rhetorically.

After Amigh’s presentation, the board went into executive session to consider the policy change.

The old policy called for retroactively charging the full amount when the authority inadvertently fails to charge a customer for a service.

Board member Jesse Ickes dissented from the vote approving the new policy — on grounds that the authority shouldn’t charge anything when it underbills a customer.

“It’s hard in any circumstances to justify a policy of going back years and asking people to pay for a bill retroactively they were not invoiced for,” Ickes said.

The new policy of forgiving the “volume-based” portion of retroactive bills won’t apply if the purpose of the bill is to charge the customer for services obtained by cheating.

An audit done in cooperation with Logan Township to verify accounts connected with township residents uncovered the Amigh oversight, said authority General Manager Mark Perry.

While the authority charged Amigh’s mother for unbilled sewer service dating to 2003, the audit showed she actually hadn’t been billed for that service since 1986, Perry said.

Such oversights occur “on a limited number of occasions,” according to the resolution that the authority approved.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.