Couple: LIPA bills us commercial rate too
Hal Bock with some of his LIPA bills, which indicate he was billed as a commercial customer. (May 17, 2011) Credit: Newsday/Karen Wiles Stabile
When Hal Bock of East Williston last week read about a LIPA customer who'd been wrongly billed as a commercial account for 11 years, he checked his bill. Guess what he found?
He, too, was being billed as a commercial customer, he discovered, but for far longer -- possibly for 34 years.
Bock and his wife, Frances, bought their house in 1977. His wife had had an office for her psychiatry practice in the home, but it's been closed for a decade, and he said the couple never applied for a commercial account.
"Until I read the [Newsday] story, I never looked at the back of the bill," he said. LIPA representatives are coming to his home tomorrow to investigate.
Bock's bills, which have been as high as $500 monthly, include an electric rate that's as much as 2 cents a kilowatt hour higher than the residential rate. He's also charged an 8.6 percent sales tax that he should never have paid at all. (In Suffolk, residents do have to pay a LIPA sales tax of 2.5 percent related to a property tax settlement involving the never-opened Shoreham nuclear plant.)
LIPA said Tuesday it was looking into the Bocks' claim, as well as other cases in which customers say they were wrongly charged.
"All of the individual cases that [Newsday] presented have existing reviews that are currently taking place and LIPA is proactively and fairly addressing the issues," spokeswoman Vanessa Baird-Streeter said.
Elizabeth Rizzo, the East Patchogue resident whom LIPA last week acknowledged has been improperly billed as a commercial account for 11 years, said this week she had not heard back from the authority. Rizzo said she wants a check from LIPA, not a bill credit.
Other LIPA customers reported similar problems in the wake of the Newsday report, which is said to have angered LIPA trustees to demand action. Suffolk Legis. Ed Romaine has requested LIPA simplify bills, a suggestion Baird-Streeter said LIPA is considering.
Theresa Kelly, a 71-year-old Massapequa Park ratepayer, said she discovered two years ago she had been wrongly billed as a commercial customer since 1982. When she demanded a full refund, representatives from National Grid, which handles customer service for LIPA, cited the Public Service Law in limiting her refund to two years of credits -- $415.
She, too, is a Nassau County resident and should not have been charged sales tax.
"They said it was my responsibility, that I should have known by a number on the back of my bill," Kelly said. "How do I know what the code number is?"
The problems are not just limited to improperly classified residential customers.
William DeBlaiso of Seaford said when he had a geothermal heat pump installed in his home in October 2001, the authority incorrectly classified him at a rate double the correct amount from May through October every year since then. Last November, after some research, he discovered the problem and called LIPA, which, he said, acknowledged it.
But, he said, LIPA will only give him a refund back to last November, when he reported the problem, not the nine years of overbilling.
"They told me that I should have notified them that I was on the wrong rate," he said. "How am I supposed to know what rate I should be on? I don't work for the company."
