LAFAYETTE PARISH — In July 2025, neighbors living on Moss Street between Mudd Avenue and Simcoe Street had low water pressure. To remedy the situation, Lafayette Utilities System hooked the houses up to a fire hydrant while they made repairs.
By January 2026, the repairs were complete, and meters were installed back into the boxes. Neighbors say that after that, bills skyrocketed.
"It went up to $400. A month later, it's $600. They said it's not our problem, but they were doing water lines and everything," Tris Madison, a man who lives in the neighborhood and who has been experiencing higher water bills, said.
I spoke to a landlord who owns four houses on the block. He says all of his tenants have seen their usage go up by what he called astronomical amounts. He said one tenant in particular saw her usage come back over 20,000 gallons. There was no pool, no lifestyle changes, just the new meter. Typically, her usage is between 3,000 and 8,000 gallons. He had two plumbers come out to assess the problem, and both said there was no leak. He opted to stay anonymous due to the forward-facing nature of his day job.
"Clearly, there is a discrepancy in how the meters are calibrated, and I can't seem to get LUS or the city to understand where the problems are," the landlord said.
When I asked LUS if this was a possibility, Customer and Support Services Manager Alison Alleman told me no. She said that a spike in use is based on habits.
"We have quality control set in place. We double-check," Alleman said.
Alleman explained that when the houses on this block were hooked to the hydrant, they were calculating bills based off of an estimate because you cannot jump a water line if a meter is installed. She made it clear that this was the only way to temporarily provide neighbors with water while they sorted out the issue.
"We have to remove the meter in order to directly connect them to provide those pressures, and so that happened for a number of months. When I reviewed the consumption for these customers, their average-ish amounts, prior to having that change occur, went back to normal when we installed the meter back in January of 2026," Alleman said.
But based off of the chart that the anonymous landlord showed me, which mapped his tenant’s water usage over the past several months, her usage in March, before the repairs started, was around 8,000 gallons for a month. Alleman could not provide an explanation for why the tenant’s usage more than doubled after the new meters were installed in January.
Resident Andre' Brown says his bills spiked even with his conservation efforts and his frequent traveling.
"We have been out of town a couple of weekends, so there was no usage. To see it spike up that much with the water, it makes no sense," Brown said.
Alleman says the issue is most likely a non-continual leak, like a flap that catches here and there.
I asked her verbatim, "So is the toilet flap what your money's on?"
"That is what my money's on," Alleman said.
Essentially, LUS says it comes down to the customer's awareness and that you should monitor your usage on your LUS "My Account."
