Atlanta Council Panel Backs Three-Month Water Bill Adjustment Authority Ahead of Oct. 19 Vote
Atlanta is a city in Fulton County, Georgia. A committee of the Atlanta City Council voted unanimously on October 13 to advance an ordinance that would give the city's watershed commissioner, or a designee, authority to adjust single-family residential water and sewer accounts from November 1, 2026, through January 31, 2027. The full Council is listed to consider the measure on October 19 at 1 p.m.; the committee action is a recommendation, not final approval.
Ordinance 26-O-1564, sponsored by Councilmembers Dustin Hillis and Liliana Bakhtiari, would allow adjustments for any period of time and in any amount, subject to the commissioner's discretion and established operating procedures. The proposal sets no dollar ceiling, but it creates no automatic entitlement to forgiveness, and the ordinance does not spell out what evidence customers would need or how individual adjustment amounts would be calculated.
The authority is tied to the city's Flexible Levels, Options, & Affordable Terms initiative, known as FLOAT, which is described as helping customers bring accounts current, offering resources to customers facing financial challenges, and allowing field-service requests to correct meter or billing problems.
An August 6 city audit put the broader stakes in context: auditors counted $236 million in delinquent water and sewer balances across 60,168 accounts as of April 2026. The audit covered all account statuses and property classes, not only the single-family residential accounts covered by the proposed authority. It also reiterated an earlier recommendation for supervisory-review thresholds and restricted access for a billing-adjustment category called A-bill; the Department of Watershed Management told auditors it was addressing earlier recommendations, although implementation progress had not yet been reported. (GSM, based on Atlanta City Council committee records and the city audit)
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：Atlanta 市政厅。图片来源：Warren LeMay，Wikimedia Commons，CC0。Photo: Atlanta City Hall. Image: Warren LeMay, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0.
