A St. Croix medical company may have overpaid the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority $21,600 because of faulty meter readings, leaving bank accounts too dry to buy patients’ medication, an owner said Tuesday.
Joanna Garcia, the practice manager at the Family Wellness and Health Center, said she had utility payments for the business and other properties she controlled come out of her account automatically because they had remained steady for years. Then there was a sudden jump.
“I’m on autopay and I only noticed it when they sent me a bill for $7,000,” Garcia said. “We’re talking about water from $40 to $3,000, and now down to $1200.”
$3,000 worth of water would have flooded her small office, she said.
Fed up, Garcia sent an email to federal and local officials, as well as the Source, pleading for an investigation into “corruption and abuse” at WAPA. The email detailed attempts to resolve billing discrepancies with the utility going back to at least April.
In January 2025, the center providing health services to Medicaid patients received a water bill of $29. In October, it was $3,065. The electricity bill in January 2025 was about $363. A year later it was $868 and by March $7,970. All without substantial changes in use, according to the emails.
“This represents an increase of 30 to 100 times my normal usage, despite no changes in occupancy, usage patterns, or property conditions that would justify such a spike. As a matter of fact, we have closed the cafe in January 2026,” Garcia wrote in the email, copying Justice Department officials. “These amounts are grossly inconsistent with our historical consumption and cannot be reasonably explained by normal usage.”
Inoperable or otherwise faulty WAPA meters may be behind many such erratic billing issues, CEO Karl Knight acknowledged Monday. He cautioned that recognizing the issue didn’t mean it’s a quick fix.
WAPA crews plan to start installing 55,000 new, better meters in September, Knight said, but the equipment swap won’t correct roughly two years of billing discrepancies.
“Sometimes we overbill customers, sometimes we underbill customers,” Knight said Monday evening. “The erraticness in billing makes our cash management a little bit difficult. Imagine if I think you owe me thousands of dollars and it turns out that instead I owe you thousands of dollars, and that’s a big swing in our ability to forecast our revenues and to manage our cash.”
WAPA has a team going over billing errors but it’s slow going, he said. Part sleuthing in historical billing records and part estimated guessing, the back office team has a pile of bills to go through.
“Sometimes it does take a while because we do have quite a preponderance of cases that we work through as quickly as we can. Some cases are a little bit more complicated than others, and so some cases do require a little bit more investigation. Some are pretty straightforward, especially if we catch it early enough,” Knight said.
“I encourage customers in that situation to come in and sit with a customer service rep and have them walk through their billing history and see if there’s anomalies that are obvious. We can then turn it over to the customer accounts folks to investigate further and determine what level of adjustment should be made to the bill,” he said.
Even after a billing error is identified, resolving the issue can be difficult. If the customer had been under billed, WAPA could help set up a payment plan. If the customer had been overbilled, they may need to settle for an account credit with the long cash-strapped utility.
That won’t work for Garcia, who was left with $700 in the bank. She needs a refund.
“I’ve never been in that situation,” she said. “I have been a very successful business owner here because I hustle.”
Knight said the authority has issued refunds in the past but usually when an account is closed. To address cases like Garcia’s, Knight said WAPA was working with the Legislature to offer payments.
The slow process has Garcia exasperated.
“I have to shoulder all these bills on my own,” she said, saying she’s considered more than once shuttering her business but feels responsible for her clients’ well-being. I cannot let go of our mental health patients. We have patients here with major PTSD; patients with real trauma from gun violence on this island. I’m not going to shut down service to these people just because WAPA decided to bully me.”
