The owner of a mobile home park in Scott says city leaders are not treating him fairly after a change to how water meters are being read.

Karl Short is the owner of Short’s Mobile Home Subdivision. He says after 20 years in business, he got a letter from city hall saying they weren’t going to be reading each home’s individual meter. Instead, a master-electric meter, that measures the use of water from the entire park will be read in the public works division by way of an app.

Short told us, “One person lives in a mobile home, some people have three people in the mobile home, some people have four and they’re all paying the same price. I don’t feel that’s fair to my tenants. I don’t feel that’s fair to me.”

Short says there are other mobile home parks where the city installed electronic meters at each trailer, but not this one. He was given the option by city leaders to read the individual meters himself and bill tenants accordingly for usage.

“Just a treat us equally to everybody else in this town. We pay taxes just like everybody, we expect to be treated the same way” Short said.

Jan-Scott Richard is the mayor of the city of Scott. He says as a means to save money, the previous administration acquired a grant to pay for electronic water meters throughout the city, but that only covered a certain number of meters.

“We were paying for the third-party meter readers and now that we’ve eliminated that and we just read the master meter, we’ve saved some money. We’ve also saved time as well and allowed our public works guys to concentrate on the things we felt were necessary”, Mayor Richard said when explaining why the city cut back on meader reading services.

Richard says a few key concerns stood out when deciding whether or not to install electric meters at multi-occupant facilities like trailer parks and apartment complexes; he cited the visibility for the tower to read the meter because some of the locations of the meters are underneath in the trailers, some of the liability involved in going onto private property to read them was another issue.

The mayor says it would be costly to either the city or the property owner relocate meters to a place the towers can get a clear signal…but the mayor says he and the council will continue to look for additional grants to pay for more automated meters for mobile home parks and apartments.

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