Shirley Shanks says she spent two days without running water in her DeKalb County home this week after crews shut off her service over a bill she had been disputing for a year — a bill she says was for more than $27,000. Shanks, 79, lives with her disabled daughter, who is blind, bedridden and has a history of two strokes. The shutoff came despite Shanks having repeatedly flagged what she and a professional inspector determined was a meter mix-up that left her being billed for a neighbor's water use.
Shanks told WSB-TV that DeKalb County crews shut off her water on Tuesday, and that service was restored after two days without water. Shanks said she typically pays about $30 to $40 a month for water. The trouble started in September 2025, when she says she noticed a billing problem and received a bill for roughly $320. Suspecting a leak, she paid it. A professional inspector later found no leak at her home — but did find that Shanks was being billed for the wrong water meter entirely. Her actual meter ends in 07, the station reports, while her bills had been tied to a meter ending in 09.
A Year Of Complaints And A Growing Bill
According to Shanks's account to the station, a subsequent bill arrived for $605, and the incorrect charges kept climbing over the following year until the total she says she was ultimately billed reached more than $27,000. She says DeKalb County investigated the problem but never corrected it, and at one point told her the county had done all it could do for her bill. County officials also told her, per her account, that they would fix the bill soon — a fix that Shanks says never came before crews arrived to shut off her water.
The disconnection lands squarely on ground DeKalb County's own commissioners have tried to fence off. In February 2025, the Board of Commissioners passed a water affordability resolution meant to shield vulnerable residents — including seniors, households with minors, and disabled individuals — from disconnections while billing disputes are pending, according to 11Alive. Shanks, at 79 and caring for a disabled daughter, would appear to fall within the categories the resolution was designed to protect, and her billing dispute had been open for roughly a year.
The County's Push To Collect $104 Million In Unpaid Water Bills
The shutoff also comes amid an aggressive countywide push to recover unpaid water debt. DeKalb County CEO Lorraine Cochran-Johnson reported in May 2025 that delinquent water bills across the county totaled $104.7 million, with 600 individual accounts owing more than $5,000 each, per WABE. County leadership has maintained that mass disconnections were not occurring, even as officials pressed to collect from accounts far behind on payments.
That collection effort is unfolding alongside steep rate increases. DeKalb County scheduled a 10% water and sewer rate hike to take effect July 1, 2025 — the first of ten consecutive annual 10% increases scheduled through 2034 — to help fund upgrades to the water system, 11Alive reported. The county's water-system upgrades address aging infrastructure, while sewer work is tied to federal consent-decree requirements related to sewage spills.
Advocates Had Already Demanded A Shutoff Pause
Community pressure over disconnections had already been building before Shanks's water was cut. In August 2025, the DeKalb Water Watch Coalition held a press conference demanding an immediate moratorium on water disconnections, citing unresolved billing disputes and unaffordable payment arrangements for fixed-income residents, 11Alive reported. Coalition members included the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Sierra Club Georgia Chapter, and New Disabled South, all urging strict enforcement of the county's own affordability rules.
The county has also stood up institutional avenues meant to catch cases like Shanks's before they reach a shutoff. DeKalb appointed the Urban League of Greater Atlanta to serve as a neutral mediator, with implementation proposed for January 1, 2026, per 11Alive. A month earlier, county officials said active billing disputes had fallen from more than 50,000 during the mid-2010s billing crisis to under 100 formal disputes, after more than 100,000 water meters were replaced.
A History Of Billing Errors Stretching Back Years
DeKalb's meter troubles are not new. The county operated under a nearly five-year moratorium on residential water disconnections from October 2016 through September 1, 2021, imposed after thousands of residents received inexplicably high monthly bills, according to The Champion Newspaper. Former Interim CEO Lee May put that freeze in place amid widespread billing errors and thousands of disputed accounts. An internal county report disclosed in 2017 found that workers had in some cases paved over water meters during sidewalk construction, leaving staff unable to read them accurately and forcing reliance on estimated bills, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported at the time.
DeKalb County Television Channel 23 has featured a proposed Water Bill Amnesty Program. It is unclear from Shanks's account whether that program was offered to her before crews shut off her service.
DeKalb is not alone in grappling with mounting water debt. A September 2026 city audit found the City of Atlanta's Department of Watershed Management is owed $236 million in delinquent water and sewer bills across more than 60,000 accounts, CBS News reported, with nearly one in four active accounts delinquent. Hoodline has previously covered a $5.1 million HOA dispute tied to the same countywide collections push, which Cochran-Johnson has said tops $100 million in unpaid water accounts overall.
For Shanks, the core request remains unchanged from when she first flagged the problem: that DeKalb County correct the water-meter and billing error that she says has plagued her account for more than a year. Her water has since been restored, but the underlying dispute over the meter mix-up and the more than $27,000 bill had not been resolved as of her account to WSB-TV.
