Captain's Cove Utility Company is the company which manages water services in the Captain's Cove…read moreneighborhood of Greenbackville, VA.
I'm not sure if it will make a difference, since we don't get a choice of who services our water in the neighborhood, nor do I know if anybody will ever actually read this review, since this yelp page seems to be pretty unpopulated. But I'm feeling so incensed at the decrepit level of service that I've received at the hands of this company, that I set up a yelp account specifically to let the world know about it, and thereby, hopefully, to begin to fix it.
I moved into Captain's Cove a year ago this month. When I moved in, I called Captain's Cove Utility Company to transfer the bills into my name. Water service had been in place to the house from the day we moved in, but I wanted to make sure the billing came to us smoothly.
It didn't. Six months later, we suddenly received a bill stating that our payments were overdue, and that if we didn't pay up pronto, we'd get our water turned off. It was the first we'd heard from the company. We had gone that long without seeing any kind of correspondence or billing from the company, assuming that the billing must be on some kind of semi-annual or annual cycle. We should not have been so passive... our fault... but this seemed sudden and excessively burdensome. Somewhat put out by the way we had been treated, we paid the bill... which was a stretch for us because we'd not had time to save or allocate those funds in our budget. We left the incident behind us, feeling that since we had finally started getting billed, things would go smoother henceforth.
It was not to be. The billing came sporadically. At one point, we received a bill which clearly showed a due date of December 30, and so we scheduled a payment with our bank to pay the appropriate amount on December 15. On December 2nd, we received another bill claiming that we were late on payments, and that if we did not pay the late amount by December 8th, our water would be shut off. Again, we paid it, but again, we were put out not only by the unexpected expense but by the conflicting, and threatening, communications which we were receiving.
By this time, we had performed a 4-month temporary move to Maryland, and I suspected that something was going wrong with our forwarded mail. It seemed reasonable that this could be part of the problem. Not the whole problem... because the communications which we were receiving were still contradictory, and threatening, and we did not feel that we deserved this treatment, because we paid the bills as often as we received them, by the dates specified.
But, trying to fix things peacefully anyway, I called the company again. I wanted to make sure they had our correct billing address, so that bills would get to us in a timely manner. Our house in Captain's Cove sits on two lots, and we are required to pay separate bills for each lot. I wanted to make sure that the bills for both lots were going to our correct billing address.
The man who answered was Bill Heern, and he identified himself as the project manager for the company's operation in Captain's Cove. Bill was, to put it mildly, the rudest, most abrupt, and absolutely impersonable human being I have ever had the displeasure to converse with, as a customer speaking to a service provider. When I asked if Bill could confirm the account numbers for the two properties in question, he said that he would look it up later. I stated that, due to my experiences with the company, I wanted to make sure the business was complete over the phone. His exact words were: "It's not gonna happen." I asked how the business would be confirmed as complete in a satisfactory way, and he said he'd "give me a call in a few days."
That was a week ago. I've not heard from Bill, and frankly, given the level of organization I see inherent in that company, I don't expect to. I have every expectation that my billing will continue to be screwed up. And if they continue to screw up my billing, and if I am unable to make the diving plays which have saved me from late charges in the past, and if they then attempt to damage my credit... then my only recourse will be legal.
The one thing which Captain's Cove Utility does do right seems to be in the area of reporting. They publish a comprehensive water quality report, which I have seen for the last year, and its results are not promising. It shows that the neighborhood obtains its water from a series of wells, and that at least one well has been shut down due to unsafe levels of arsenic, and other wells are hovering just below the level considered "safe" by the EPA.
I don't know how to fix this, short of firing this outfit and completely replacing it with something else. It's my strong recommendation that they be replaced with a company that has a vague idea of how to perform proper water service.
