Trust me I’m an Italian

We went to the meeting today about our water.  Anna was there with 4 others, family and friends, also Pietro and Stella, us 2, the Acea man and 2 Comune people. Also there was Mara who has helped us in the past to offer translation, we’ve spoken to her by phone a few times but never met her, she was adorable.

The meeting was called for 3.30, we residents all arrived in good time and waited until 4.10 before anything happened.  There was a lot of shouting and talking over each other, people were keen to retell how many leaks they’d had and the hours of work to locate and fix them.  I soon lost the will to live (in Italy) but I did take some notes, these will amuse you.

We’d been told Acea were aware of our concerns and that we weren’t happy with their proposal but it was clear nothing had changed, it was take it or leave it so the meeting was pointless.  These are some of the responses.

We can only have one quotation one client and one bill for the 4 houses in our road because for the purpose of the contract we are a condominium, they agreed we are in fact 4 unconnected houses and not a condominium but the offer doesn’t change. 

Because Acea are a public company they can only work on public land, in fact they are a private company and we know of several local properties that have meters in their private gardens or in their houses. When we asked again about the legislation they said there is nothing written but it’s a verbal rule.

Although they have quoted for 25 mm diameter pipe which is sufficient for only one house they will in fact provide a 60 mm pipe but they won’t revised their quotation to confirm this and we must sign up to the original offer, at least Anna does because the rest of us don’t sign anything we just cough up the money.

They cannot run the new tube down the gully and place the meters half way down our road, because it is illegal to have water pipes in a gully.  We did explain that they are well aware our supply has come down the gully for 30 years and no one has ever challenged it.

We asked about the additional cost of work to run pipes from the meters at the top of our road to our houses, we have to arrange that between us, manage and coordinate the work with the new meter installation, I’ve no idea who is going to do that.

We asked when the work would take place and Acea said as soon as they have the money, yeah right.

We also asked what would happen if we paid for the new pipe and then some others nearby wanted to connect to it for 87 euro.  Anna said they wouldn’t be able to do so as we’d paid for the pipes and they were ours, of course they will belong to Acea we just pay for them.  

The two sets of neighbours present are keen to go ahead, we and the third neighbour who was not there have our doubts. We were asked for our decision but said we hadn’t made one, we have to decide by next week.

Its completely against our culture to pay in advance for something so vague without contract or control, a real recipe for disaster.  The other 2 families say if we don’t agree they will go ahead and we cannot connect to the system later, we wouldn’t try do that it would be immoral.  We got the impressions they were bluffing and trying to pressurise us, if we and the absent neighbour don’t go ahead the other 2 would be looking at at least 10,000 euro each, Pietro and Stella are here for less than 4 weeks a year so that’s lot of money.  

What will we do, I have no idea, I’m open to suggestions.