CHICAGO (CBS) — Getting Hosed was going to be a single story about a couple billed $58,000 for water they didn’t use. Now, it’s more than two years of chronicling unfair and potentially unlawful water billing practices in Chicago.
The CBS 2 Investigators have found the City department whose taxpayer-funded responsibility it is to provide safe, affordable drinking water has utterly failed consumers and undermined our investigative efforts at every turn.
We’ve long known the City takes an apathetic approach to customer service, but until this story, we didn’t realize how callously indifferent it could be.
Targeting Chicago’s Most Vulnerable Population
Beatrice Ritchie spent 48 years as Ms. Ritchie: a special education teacher at Chicago’s Public Schools. She dedicated her life to Chicago’s most vulnerable. Now she’s the vulnerable one: she has dementia.
We interviewed her early in the day, while she’s still able to recount some of her greatest accomplishments, such as being the second Black speech therapist in the City of Chicago.
But what brought us to Ms. Ritchie wasn’t her impressive teaching background or her failing memory — it was her water bill, which she’s of course forgotten.
The bill for her Southside six-flat is now nearly $60,000 — for water that was never used. In fact, the building…
