The city’s hardest collection cases include apartment and condominium properties where residents may not control the account.
The question being argued at City Hall is whether Atlanta should start shutting off water over unpaid bills.
It is the wrong tense.
Between July 1, 2023, and March 31, 2026, the city terminated water service 5,363 times, according to an August follow-up audit from the City Auditor’s Office.
Of those shutoffs, 5,188 involved accounts classified as residential. Another 175 involved commercial accounts.
The unresolved question is not whether Atlanta will disconnect service. It is which accounts the city pursues next, how accurate their balances are and what happens when the person who loses water is not the person responsible for paying the city.
The total is now part of the dispute
The audit placed Atlanta’s delinquent water and sewer balance at $236,381,880 across 60,168 accounts as of April 10, 2026.
That was approximately $39 million more than the $197,823,751 reported in June 2023, an increase of 19 percent. Almost one-quarter of the city’s active water and sewer accounts were delinquent.
Department of Watershed Management Commissioner Greg Eyerly disputes the $236.4 million figure. He told City Council that the balance was closer to $184 million.
As of Sept. 22, however, the department had not provided the City Auditor or reporters with records supporting that lower figure. Watershed attributed the difference to when the data was pulled and how the department calculates delinquency. The audit used information extracted from Watershed’s own billing system.
That leaves Atlanta with two competing totals and no public reconciliation between them.
Nothing on a paying customer’s bill changes because of the audit. The significance is what the unresolved debt may eventually shift onto customers who do pay, either through rates, delayed infrastructure work or the cost of balances the city writes off.
A residential account may represent an entire building
The audit classifies nearly 54,000 delinquent accounts as residential, compared with about 5,700 commercial accounts.
Residential accounts carried approximately $197 million, or 83 percent of the reported balance. The auditor attributes much of that share to a straightforward fact: residential customers make up most of the system.
But “residential” does not always mean one household with one unpaid bill.
The 50 largest accounts in that category owed nearly $40 million. Camelot Club Condominiums led the list at approximately $3.25 million, followed by condominium associations, homeowner associations and apartment ownership entities.
Those accounts can cover buildings or communities containing many individual households.
If water is billed through an apartment owner, condominium association or property entity, the city may have no direct account relationship with the people living inside. A tenant can be current on rent while the account serving the building remains delinquent.
Mayor Andre Dickens has identified that as the city’s hardest enforcement problem. Cutting off an owner who failed to pay can also cut water to residents who never received the city’s bill.
Before assuming your own payment history determines your exposure, renters and condominium owners should find out whose name is actually on the water account serving their home.
More than half the commercial debt sits in 50 accounts
Commercial arrears totaled approximately $29 million in the audit. The 50 largest commercial accounts represented $15.4 million, or 53 percent of that total.
The April list included VCP Medical Partners LLC at approximately $2.68 million, the U.S. Postal Service at $511,980, a Chick-fil-A location at $471,209, the Fulton County Finance Department at $299,138, Jamestown Ponce City Market LP at $197,882, Georgia State University at $172,130 and the Atlanta Board of Education at $137,080.
Those figures should not be read as current invoices.
The list is a snapshot from April 10, and the audit identified active disputes involving some large accounts. Multiple organizations named in the report have since challenged the balances. Chick-fil-A says the restaurant account has been paid, while Ponce City Market says its listing resulted from a billing mix-up that is being resolved.
The dispute does not erase the audit. It demonstrates why accurate balances have to come before aggressive enforcement.
The city recorded only 175 commercial shutoffs during the same period in which its audit reported $29 million in commercial arrears. That difference deserves as much attention as the total number of residential disconnections.
Atlanta has increased collections, but the old recommendations remain open
The city has taken more action since its previous audit.
That earlier review found 737 service terminations across 12 years. The city recorded 5,363 in less than three years after residential enforcement resumed in 2023.
Watershed has also written off nearly $62 million in uncollectible balances and hired a third-party collection agency in December 2024.
The age of the remaining debt creates another problem. The audit found nearly $200 million was at least 90 days delinquent as of March 2026. Under the department’s accounting standards, balances between 90 days and one year old are considered 95 percent uncollectible. Balances older than a year are treated as entirely uncollectible.
Only inactive accounts can be written off, however. Debt can remain on the books when an account is still receiving service, even if the department does not expect to recover it.
Atlanta’s code says service is to be terminated no later than 30 days after the due date for a monthly bill, or 60 days for a bimonthly bill. The city did not consistently enforce residential shutoffs for years before restarting them in 2023.
The December 2023 audit made seven recommendations addressing collections, write-offs, account monitoring and enforcement. The August 2026 follow-up made no new recommendations. Instead, it reported that Watershed said it was addressing the previous ones but had not yet submitted progress showing they were implemented.
The paper trail goes back further. The City Auditor’s public index includes water billing and collection reports from 2003, 2004 and 2006.
This is not a newly discovered problem. What is new is its reported size and the pressure to show what the city will do next.
Atlanta should not treat every delinquent account as the same problem.
A household that cannot cover one bill, a landlord collecting rent without paying the building’s water account, a disputed corporate balance and an old account the city considers uncollectible require different responses.
The city has already shown that it will disconnect residential service. The next test is whether it can verify the balances, distinguish tenants from the entities responsible for paying and pursue the large, concentrated accounts with the same urgency. City Utilities Committee Chair Dustin Hillis says he will require biweekly account updates from Watershed. Eyerly says additional write-off and amnesty legislation is coming. Those actions, along with whether commercial shutoffs rise above 175, will show whether this audit changes the collection system or simply adds another report to it.
