A petition drive led by the city’s firefighters union opposing San Antonio Water System rate increases had less than half the signatures needed, SAWS officials said in a Friday legal filing.

In March, several San Antonio firefighters union members led by union consultant Greg Brockhouse submitted more than 6,300 signatures to the Public Utility Commission of Texas. The signatures purportedly came from SAWS customers outside the city limits. State law only allows customers served by a municipal utility to challenge rate increases before the PUC if they live outside the city’s political jurisdiction.

After City Council approval in November, SAWS raised rates for most customers in January to pay for a plant to treat salty groundwater now under construction in South Bexar County, the 142-mile Vista Ridge pipeline project, and sewer improvements required by the federal government. The increase raised the average customer’s monthly bill from $51.75 to $58.60, with projections to rise to $81.73 by 2020.

Over 10 days in March, Brockhouse, several firefighters and other volunteers knocked on doors and approached people to collect signatures challenging the rate increases. They hired Austin attorney Roger Borgelt, who has experience in utility rate cases, to file an appeal saying SAWS rates are “unreasonably preferential, prejudicial, and discriminatory.”

This was the first time SAWS customers have challenged the utility’s rates before the PUC, SAWS Vice President Mary Bailey said.

Bailey said the utility’s staff went through the petition signature by signature. She said they cross-referenced the names and addresses in the petition with those in SAWS’ databases and maps of the utility’s service area. The review found 2,646 invalid signatures, leaving only 3,680, the SAWS filing states.

Under state law, a petition must include signatures from at least 10 percent of eligible ratepayers. SAWS said they would have needed 7,603 signatures for the petition to qualify for 10 percent of the 76,030 customers outside city limits.

“We feel they didn’t even meet the 10 percent threshold,” SAWS President and CEO Robert Puente said. “Even if 100 percent of the signatures were valid, they wouldn’t meet the 10 percent requirement.”

On Friday, Brockhouse said he and the other petitioners believed there were about 56,000 SAWS customers outside city limits, based on information he obtained from SAWS in a January open records request for customers’ names and addresses. He said the utility’s response counted SAWS customers from customers of the former BexarMet utility, which integrated with SAWS in 2011. Former BexarMet customers will continue paying slightly different rates than the rest of the SAWS customers until January.

Bailey said she and five of her staff, SAWS internal auditors and geospatial mapping staff spent 500 work hours going through the signatures looking for those that did not qualify.

“Some of them were really obvious,” she said.

In the filing, SAWS said 796 were multiple signatures for one account, 648 had no qualifying address outside city limits and 1,202 did not match the customer name on the SAWS accounts.

In a Friday news release, Puente said, “This attempt to challenge our rates has proven to be an expensive maneuver by the fire union to distract attention from their issues with city management.”

For two years, the city’s public safety unions have been locked in negotiations and litigation over their contracts.

In March, Mayor Ivy Taylor criticized union leadership for the stalled talks. District 9 Councilman Joe Krier also released a statement in March criticizing the union for attacking SAWS’ Vista Ridge project, which would pipe up to 16.3 billion gallons of water per year from Burleson County.

“Once again, union leaders are trying to divert the public’s attention from the fact that they refuse to sit down and bargain for a labor contract that’s fair to their members and to taxpayers,” Krier’s statement read.

Brockhouse said Friday that the rate challenge is not about the unions’ contracts. Instead, police and fire unions are opposing rate increases by an appointed board to pay for a project most San Antonians do not support, he said.

“These people do whatever they want to do without government oversight,” he said of SAWS.

Brockhouse said the petition drive was not an official union function, and other volunteers joined union members in their petition drive. While they used some money from the union’s political action committee to pay volunteers either a flat rate or per signature for their efforts, other payments to volunteers came from donations, he said.

Brockhouse said the union will have to discuss how it will pay for attorney’s fees in the months ahead. Union political action money can only be spent after a union committee vote, he said.

“The honest, upfront truth is we haven’t yet discussed where the money will come from,” he said.

The petitioners and the PUC staff have until June 17 to file a response to SAWS’ rate analysis, PUC spokesman Terry Hadley said. If applicable, SAWS can file a motion to dismiss the case by June 24. If that happens, the petitioners and PUC staff will have until July 1 to respond, he said.

If this petition fails, Brockhouse said he would consider leading another petition drive in January when BexarMet customers’ rates increase.

“This is also going to be a learning lesson,” he said. “If we get potential to come back and do it in January, we will.”

bgibbons@express-news.net, Twitter: @bgibbs