A Tulsa family says they were charged $215 a month for eight months, while their water bill stayed exactly the same month after month — and nobody at the city told them anything was wrong. The discovery, made only after multiple trips to city hall, comes as Tulsa works through a first round of meter replacements tied to a manufacturer defect affecting thousands of properties across the city.
A Bill That Never Changed
Sharon Kus says her mother, Martha, first noticed something odd when her water bill stayed exactly the same for months in a row, according to KTUL. Martha ended up visiting Tulsa City Hall three times before anyone could explain why, and the city eventually told her that her meter had been broken since March. Sharon Kus says the family was charged $215 each month for eight months despite the malfunctioning equipment, and that the city never reached out to notify them about the problem on its own.
Her husband, Jimmi Kus, told KTUL he was stunned both by how long the meter had gone unfixed and by how many other households might be dealing with the same issue without knowing it. As of the article's publication, the Kus family's meter still had not been replaced, and the family says it plans to ask the city whether it will repay them for the earlier billing cycles once a new meter is finally installed.
Thousands of Meters, One Manufacturer Defect
The Kus family's experience lines up with a citywide problem Tulsa announced in early October: Meter Works, a city contractor, would begin replacing more than 600 residential and small commercial water meters because of a manufacturer defect. Those units belong to an initial group of roughly 9,200 recently installed Neptune ultrasonic automatic meters across Tulsa properties, and the city says it plans to replace all of the affected meters later this year.
That replacement work is now underway. According to NewsOn6, Meter Works began replacing about 609 water meters in its first round, a job officials expect to wrap up in about a week. The outlet reports the meters are part of the broader group of roughly 9,200 Neptune ultrasonic meters slated for replacement, and notes that the manufacturer — not the city or its ratepayers — is covering the cost of both the new meters and the labor to install them.
How the City Calculates Estimated Bills
While meters sit broken, the city says affected customers are not left unbilled — their accounts are instead placed on standard estimated billing based on each property's historical water usage, per the same NewsOn6 report. Sharon Kus has publicly questioned whether that historical data was reliable in the first place, asking whether the estimates themselves depended on earlier readings from the same faulty automatic-reader system now being replaced.
The city's own utility FAQ lays out how those estimates are built. Per the City of Tulsa, a bill may be estimated when a meter cannot be read due to factors like weather conditions or inaccessible meters. For bills estimated between November and March, the city computes the estimate from the average daily consumption over the previous three years; for bills estimated April through October, it uses the previous 12 months instead. The city adds that it does not typically estimate consumption unless it already has at least two actual monthly reads on file before the estimate begins.
Tulsa says the system is designed to even out over time. If an actual reading eventually replaces an estimate, the next bill is reconciled — customers see a credit if the estimate ran high, or a higher bill if it ran low. Residents can check whether their own bill was estimated by looking at the Read Type field on the second page of the statement, where an EST or MAN notation indicates the charge was based on average usage per day rather than an actual read.
Not the City's First Meter Trouble
This is not Tulsa's first run-in with meter-reading problems. In an earlier case reported by KJRH, the city admitted a different customer's meter wasn't reading consumption properly from October 2021 through September 2022, and had estimated her usage at 6,000 gallons a month for that entire stretch. That same report noted Tulsa had grown its meter-reading staff to 13 people, up from 11 in February, with four more in training at the time.
Tulsa World has also reported that a city meter reader once fabricated readings for homes in a south Tulsa neighborhood for at least half a year before getting caught, a separate customer-relations episode the paper said city staff had to address. And the defective-meter fix now underway is only a sliver of a much larger overhaul: a city contractor had replaced 10,900 water meters but still had 134,000 left to go, according to an earlier NewsOn6 report on Tulsa's broader meter-upgrade program, which the city says launched in 2024 and is expected to take three to four years. ENVOCORE RTS Water Solutions is listed as the contractor performing that wider installation work, per the city's own program page.
For now, Sharon Kus is urging other Tulsa residents to keep a close eye on their own water bills, especially if the total has not budged in months. With thousands of Neptune meters still awaiting replacement and estimated billing filling the gap in the meantime, her family's unresolved question — whether the city will make good on the months it says were overcharged — remains open.
