A sub bill was requested in September 2007. As the bill was written at the time of the request for a sub. bill there was an effort to make the new law apply to all types of water suppliers, municipal, township, village, with a slight variance for 6119 providers. There was a desire to maintain that structure, but change the singular focus of the bill to state that all of these providers of water, including 6119s, can only file liens that are more than $20 and less than $200. With this concept there would be no need to mandate that notice requirements must be in place for water providers, thus, those provisions and all other non-relevant section changes were removed.
LSC 127 0737-5 states that unpaid water rents and charges and penalties may be certified to the county auditor or collected by action at law only in an amount that is not less than $20 and not more than $200 if the water was provided to an individually metered residential property that is not owner-occupied. The bill still proposes to allow in all other cases, unpaid water rents and charges and penalties to be certified to the county auditor or collected by action of law in the amount of the unpaid water rents and charges and penalties.
We believe this eliminates the constitutional concerns of home rule intrusion and puts the efforts on the work performed by water providers turned over to the county auditor, whose operations the General Assembly can oversee with statutory changes.
The dash-5 version also maintains that if a tenant is obligated under a rental agreement to pay directly for the charges for water service and those charges are not paid within 30 days after they become due, then the tenant is in default in the payment of rent.
