Don Kirkland
Don Kirkland
By Don Kirkland | Independent Newsmedia
For those who’ve lived in, and loved, Tempe as long as we have, no pleasure is gained from a story that might cause the average person to wonder if their passion for our favorite city could have been misplaced.
Absolutely not. Or, well, mostly not.
The situation in point arose after our longtime neighbor, a 93-year-old retired RN, reached a stage where the home she and her late husband spent years maintaining became just too much.
Oh yes, we’d spot her during her daily ritual of caring for the flower beds in front, trimming the low-hanging limbs of a couple of scraggly trees along the walkway, putzing around — doing whatever old-lady housewives do to avoid facing the realities that come with being a nonagenarian.
As far as we could tell, not much had changed in her 90-plus years.
But it was no surprise to any who’ve watched as folks begin the trickle-down path to aging that our neighbor was slowly running out of steam. That was when — happily told — a daughter and son-in-law living in another state realized it was time to convince mom to accept reality, stop fighting the inevitable and move in with them.
Yes, it took some doing, but mom finally relented.
The flower beds got a little scraggly; the grass an inch or two longer. But even those minor issues seemed to be under control, presumably thanks to a small parade of maintenance folks the family had hired to make sure the place would continue to look ship-shape until they figured out what to do with it.
So all was well as far as we could tell from an occasional peek over the block wall that separates our little castles.
Until, that is, my son took a quick stroll into the neighbor’s backyard, only to discover a floodgate of water apparently resulting from a worker having left a hose running for what we determined to be something close to a week, and hurriedly turned off the spigot.
The question, of course, was what’s this little oversight going to cost. More than a coupla bucks, we knew. Fifty? 80? 100 or so!?” Hold your breath: $718.
We knew mom would be surprised when the bill arrived. And shocked. And of course just a teeny bit worried about where she was going to find $718 to pay such a tab.
That, of course, was when the daughter and son-in-law put all the pieces of the story together, figuring the nice city of Tempe people would come up with some sort of reasonable solution.
Oops…
Seems that no one but the original signers on city water bills — in this case mom, now too frantic to jump into the midst of this backyard calamity from 1,500 miles away, or dad, who had passed on decades ago — are eligible to engage in any further discussion. In other words, from the standpoint of the arbiters of this little predicament: End of discussion. Period.
It was at this point that the family members put their creative heads together and agreed to simply write the darn check.
Which would be the end of the story if it hadn’t been for Susie Steckner, a thoughtful member of the city’s public-information staff, offering to hunt down one of her counterparts in the municipal water department and suggest a solution — or at least part of one.
To wit — and, we hope, to the benefit of us all:
“Our policy states that to protect the privacy of our customers, accounts may only be accessed by the account holder. In this circumstance, written documentation such as a death certificate must be provided in order to make changes to the account.
"To help, we would invite the family to provide the documentation that’s needed to get the account information updated.
“The city of Tempe offers a once in a lifetime adjustment to water bills where there have been issues such as leaks, and provides a partial refund.
“Once the account information is updated, (mom) can assist them with that process.”
From our little vantage point next door, all’s well that ends well.
But I’ll betcha those in our household at least will make sure stuff is shut off before we head out next time.
If only for a quick day trip to Prescott.
Don Kirkland is publisher of the Wrangler News Independent. Please send your comments to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines at https://www.yourvalley.net/civility-checklist.
