6 October—Litchfield’s sewer tax bills were over a month late this year, having arrived just last Friday. Technically, they’re sewer use bills rather than tax bills. But the payments are commonly—erroneously albeit intentionally—deducted along with—or as—property tax on personal tax returns. The town’s Water Pollution Control Authority, still fondly known as the Sewer Commission to appreciative sewer users, has the competence to lay its own taxes—rather, use fees—independent of the town’s budget.

Last year the Sewer Commission farmed out sewer use fee collection to the town’s tax collector for an extra emolument (of course). And the tax collector farms the billing out to a subcontractor. We don’t know if the subcontractor is paid out of the extra emolument or the tax collector’s annual budget. That matters because many, perhaps most, Litchfield property owners use their own septic systems rather than municipal sewers and shouldn’t have to contribute to a service they don’t receive.

So last year was the first time the town tax collector actually handled the sewer bills. And last year, for the first time ever, a neighbor down the road was billed for sewer use—a sewer connection—that has never existed. No house, no structure, no plumbing, no sewer on, in, or under the land. The land in question is a lot noncontiguous to the neighbor’s house lot, on the books and taxed as a separate parcel, that’s too small to build anything on and is just a lawn. Nothing but a little patch of grass.

So the neighbor gathered the paperwork to prove it and went to the tax collector at Town Hall to have the error corrected. And the tax collector, while not apologizing for the error and inconvenience, assured the neighbor that right would be done, the correction would be made.

But right wasn’t done, the correction wasn’t made. So Friday the previously overtaxed neighbor who last year had been billed for a nonexistent sewer connection received this year’s bill. You guessed it, for the actual sewer connection to the single-family dwelling and (of course) the nonexistent connection that was supposed to have been corrected. With whopping great interest thrown in.

How could that happen? Well, like just about everything else these days, it’s likely a computer software problem. Probably not a malfunction, though. Just that the software used to generate property tax bills may not be the correct software to generate sewer use bills. Or perhaps that it wasn’t correctly adapted for the purpose.

In all events, with no pun intended, the buck stops with Litchfield’s tax collector. And besides doing everything to unscrew the biennial screw-up (which probably has affected more sewer users than just my neighbor) without delay and ensure that it won’t happen again, she owes all the aggrieved sewer users abject apologies . . .