It’s hard to say who was less popular this summer: BP or Washington. Congress’ approval rating dropped to 11 percent, Barack Obama’s poll numbers plunged, and even those back-biting “Real Housewives of D.C.” lost viewers.
At least BP got kudos when it canned CEO Tony Hayward.
But I am not here to beat up on Washington. I’m here to poke Colorado. After weeks away, I returned home to Denver recently to an outbreak of news about institutional overreaches, administrative sloth and poor customer service. Beltway bunglers have nothing on the Colorado brand.
We’ll start small — with Tiny Town, an 85-year-old kiddie park that’s survived fire and floods, bankruptcies and blizzards. The park was fined a steep $30,500 after an accident on its tiny train sent 15 passengers to the hospital, all but one of whom were released the same day.
The engineer admitted he opened the throttle and hit the brakes at the same time. But to call this an “accident” is as quaint and as dated as Tiny Town itself. Things don’t just go wrong; someone must pay.
So state inspectors imposed their sharia-like fine. Even Tiny Town’s wee-est patrons could spot the bully on this playground.
Cynics might say Tiny Town needs to take a page out of the E-470 Public Highway Authority’s playbook. This Aurora-based institution has served its customers by using the old bait-and-wait technique. In several cases, E-470 apparently delayed mailing toll bills to drivers, so that by the time drivers did get their bills, they were loaded with fines and late fees.
Jaime Witkamp of Parker was charged $2,536.50 — even though she’d accrued only $72.50 in toll fees over 12 months. Parker said she never received a bill for the tolls. Instead, when she did get billed, it was for the unpaid toll charges, as well as a $70 penalty and the $7 fee for each of her 32 license-plate toll transactions. Witkamp fought the charges, eventually persuading E-470 to accept just the original $72.50 in tolls.
The toll authority finally relented, announcing it’s modifying its billing practices and will give drivers with overdue fines a “fresh start” by waiving them.
Another industry that may change its billing practices is banking. A Loveland woman sued Wells Fargo bank, arguing it charged her seven overdraft fees when it should have charged her one ($245 vs. $35.)
Wells Fargo, like banks across the country, says it processes a customer’s biggest check first in a given period to ensure that the customer’s most important bills are paid first. But a customer’s overdraft charges can explode under this system, which one California judge has called a “trap.”
Wells Fargo will get a chance to explain the system in detail in a courtroom soon. A national class-action lawsuit is in the works.
To round out the bad news for consumers, Xcel Energy wants its Colorado customers to pick up the tab for a miscalculation. An Xcel pilot project that was supposed to cost $15.3 million tripled to $45 million over the past two years. The utility’s experimental SmartGridCity project, which gives customers a real-time account of their energy consumption— ran into some unforeseen costs.
The Public Utilities Commission will decide if and how much of the $30 million overage Xcel can add to the bills of its 1.1 million customers, but my guess is it’s academic. Ratepayers will foot the bill down the line.
Never in my memory has the country been so anxious about money. But if the recession has made many of us start sleeping with one eye open, the good news is this: We still have some old-fashioned, boots-on- the-ground news organizations that expose misuses of power, and they’re blowing the whistle on trainwrecks much larger than the spill of Old Engine No. 10 at Tiny Town.
Mary Winter (mwinte@aol.com) of Denver, a former Rocky Mountain News writer, works for .
