Unwashed and Weary : Residents of Apartment Must Lug Water While Dispute Over Payment of DWP Debt Drags On
A couple of times each month, a Los Angeles landlord fails to pay his water bill and the Department of Water and Power prods him by shutting off his building’s water.
Usually, DWP officials say, a day or two of phone calls from irate tenants convinces the landlord to pay up.
However, such indirect coercion did not work so sweetly at a building at 1325 Ingraham St., a nicely kept three-story apartment a block off Wilshire Boulevard near downtown.
Because of a numbingly complicated squabble over financial liability, Tuesday was the sixth consecutive day that tenants in the 24-unit building have lived without tap water.
“We feel so dirty--we are dirty,” moaned renter Ruth Guerin, who lives on the second floor.
What makes it even harder to take is the fact that the water bill for the property is paid up. The DWP figured that shutting off the supply line there was the only way to force payment by the building’s owner of a $15,000 water bill the department says is owed at another piece of property he no longer owns.
Ever since the water stopped flowing at noon Thursday, the weary tenants, many of them elderly, have filled large plastic pails at a nearby outdoor faucet and lugged it back in--sometimes up to the third floor.
To avoid having to carry water, some tenants have run garden hoses out their windows, into a next-door building, where tenants are willing to hook the lines up to their faucets.
In interviews Tuesday, residents expressed disbelief that their plight had gone on this long.
“It’s wearing us down. We’re half sick,” said Ella Hayes, a 13-year tenant, who said she makes three trips a day from her first-floor unit across an alley to the faucet of a printing company, which is letting residents use its water.
“It is horrible,” Guerin said. “You don’t lose a drop of water. You take a bath and then you use the water in the bathtub to flush the toilet.”
“It’s very hard,” added Leticia Salazar, who was nursing a sore throat that she developed when her feet got wet making water runs from her third-floor unit. “I worry about the water being contaminated.”
A Matter of Policy
Jim Derry, director of customer relations for the DWP, explained that all utilities handle a customer’s unpaid bill by threatening to cut off service to all properties held by that customer--even if the debt comes from only some of those properties.
What has kept the taps shut off at the Ingraham Street apartments is a squabble over just who owns what.
According to the DWP, the man responsible for the water bill is Al Lemerande of Hemet. Derry said Lemerande is also responsible for unpaid bills of $15,000 on another Los Angeles building that Lemerande sold some time ago.
The DWP threatened to shut off water at the Ingraham address because it believed it was the only piece of Los Angeles property Lemerande was responsible for.
Landlord Stands Firm
However, Lemerande was unmoved by the threat. First, he said, he doesn’t believe he owes the DWP the $15,000 in the first place. The alleged liability came from a business partner who listed him as the responsible party on DWP records without his knowledge, the Hemet man said. As a result, he would not pay.
And second, as far as the building on Ingraham Street goes, Lemerande said, he has not owned that for two months, since he sold it to Neil H. Blueler, owner of Broadway Management in Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles County Health Department, after much wrangling over property records, decided on Tuesday that Blueler is indeed the current owner and asked the city attorney’s office to cite him for violating a county law requiring a landlord to provide water to his tenants.
Blueler did not return a phone call Tuesday. His attorney declined to discuss the matter.
Remedy for Residents
As of Tuesday night, it appeared that the quickest way for the water to be turned on at the apartment building will be for the tenants to shell out about $35 apiece, enough to raise the $800 deposit the DWP requires.
Putting up the deposit and forming an association would allow the tenants to take over month-to-month responsibility for the property themselves. The DWP would then pursue Lemerande’s alleged debt separately.
However, even this compromise may stall.
Some tenants feel that if they are going to chip in for the deposit, Blueler’s management company should deduct an equivalent sum from their rents.
And so it goes . . .
“I figured this would be just a few days,” tenant Hayes said. “They don’t do things like this in America. We believed that on the third day.”
