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I'm a fairly recent immigrant from a large northern metropolitan area to the Durham area. Please! Somebody explain to me why so many City of Durham employees seem to be utterly inept at doing their jobs. Very often, when I've needed to deal with the City of Durham, the experience has been almost unbelievable! I've come to dread having to deal with them. They seem to have no concept of "public service", and often act like they consider themselves superior to members of the general public. Many people there don't seem to even be able to comprehend the spoken or written English language!! The City's Human Resources department personnel never return phone calls or voice mails, and they completely forget to mail things or do what they've said they will. The finance and billing departments make all kinds of errors. And then it takes forever to get a rebate or credit, if you even ever do. Then, if you're actually able to talk to somebody, "the check is in the mail"!
Someone, please tell me! What in the flock is going on with that place?
Well, you've got to remember that Durham voters re-elected Mike Nifong as District Attorney after it was abuntantly clear he was trying to railroad the Duke students. So it's pretty clear that Durham voters like incompetent government, and from your report it seems that they have it.
OMG I WAS JUST THINKING THIS!!!!!!!! I recently moved from Raleigh due to my job, and now I'm regretting that... it's almost worth the commute not to deal w/ Durham ppl... my water bill was $400... you tell me how much water you have to consume for it to be $400 in Raleigh!!! They charged me over $35 just to read the meter... Ok: so I have to pay you to do your job??!?! wtf... and they charged me a $50 deposit, even though when I applied to get water I had a letter of credit from Progress Energy saying I pay my bills basically, so that fee was supposed to be waived.... what a headache. uggghhhh i feel your pain yankee dog
bdavis511 (and others)-I am sorry you are having to deal with the billing issues/charges. Our first bill when we moved to Durham over a year ago also had the 50 dollar deposit charge after they approved the letter from Progress Energy (and that was after 5 tries faxing it to them and being told that they couldn't find it). It took them a couple of billing cycles to credit it back to our account because it took that long for them to get it logged into their system. They asked us to continue to call back to ensure it was credited properly. It was a very frustrating experience having to call the finance department a handful of times to get them to charge us the correct amount, but eventually it did get straitened out. There were a few individuals that were very helpful.
I will say thank goodness for Durham 1 call- I can't imagine how awful is was before they started that-yipes!
$400 for a bimonthly water bill is definitely not normal. My bill in Durham has never been north of $80 for two months worth of water and sewer service. I've never seen any kind of $35 meter-reading charge, either.
I'm curious about this $400 water bill and the $35 meter-reading fee. My coworker says there's no such fee on her bill and she can't imagine how they could even get to a $400 water bill. Are you providing water to your whole area? Wow, that's crazy! You really should fight that and see if you can't get them to look into that.
Never had any problems with Durham City Gov't, in three years of dealing with them. Even got my final water bill for my old address sent to me in a handwritten envelope to my new address from the same person I spoke to on the phone.
Sure, city government can be slow, bureaucratic and prone to mistakes. Please show me a city government that is not.
Durham reminds me of where I used to live, New Orleans.
Incompetent and corrupt.
By the way, Raleigh now reams you $50 to start water service.
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. It was a very frustrating experience having to call the finance department a handful of times to get them to charge us the correct amount, but eventually it did get straitened out. There were a few individuals that were very helpful.
