WILLIAMS—at the May 23rd meeting of the Williams City Council, the council voted to install “advanced metering infrastructure” or “smart meters” in place of analog meters.

Residents in Sedona fought their City Council to prevent a $75 dollar fee and an additional $30 a month to opt out of the program. The State of California requires an opt out program for their utility companies. Texas is considering legislation banning the use of the technology altogether because of privacy concerns violating the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

According to the minutes of the meeting, Mayor John Moore, “…expressed concern for the control of individuals’ power service.”

The minutes record that Joe Carter answered that the when an individual comes in to pay their bill, staff will update the system, and services would be restored as soon as payment is made; all of this would be done by the push of a button.

Brenda Hazlett of APS added, “This process is actually faster than if they were to dispatch a meter reader to go out and turn service back on.”

This assessment did not bear out the morning of Tuesday, July 23rd for residents at 118 W. Route 66 in downtown Williams. Glen Davis, a resident of the apartments, returned home about 10:45 to find his electricity out. He confronted APS and was told that the electricity was out due to non-payment.

The owner, Lea Bowden, checked with APS at about 11:32 and found that the payment made, but applied to a wrong account. Electrical power was not restored until approximately 12:15—43 minutes after the error was reported to APS. Power had been out for approximately two-hours.

Davis complained that while he knew of the power outage to replace meters, he was never informed of the actual date of the outage and never received one of the promised notification slips. He claims he has lost two DVD recorders on his computer and his computer has been acting up since they switched out the meters without his knowledge.