On 28 October 2026, Capital Region Water accidentally sent its monthly billing email list to all of its customers. The attachment listed every account billed in the October consumption cycle: account number, customer name, email, mailing address and amount due. It is believed to be the e-bill list only, so customers who get a paper bill in the mail would not appear in it. If so, measured against the more than 18,000 customers a state representative's office cites for CRW, these 5,622 accounts would be about 31% of the system, roughly a quarter to a third. This page is what that one file reveals about who owns the city's water accounts. Individual customers are anonymized throughout; businesses and organizations are named.
Every original bill, split first by who is billed and then by what kind of owner sits behind the business accounts. The business branch is colored; the residential side is grey for scale. Switch to dollars to see how differently the money divides.
Businesses and organizations ranked by accounts held, against the running share of all business-held accounts. A steep start means a few owners hold most of it.
Accounts billed to each entity in this cycle. One account is one metered service, so a building with several meters counts more than once.
Many single-property LLCs share one billing email, which usually means one landlord or property manager runs them. Entities are grouped when they share a billing address for email. The contact column shows only the email domain.
| Operator group | Entities | Accounts | Total billed | Billing contact |
|---|
One bubble per entity, sized by accounts held, placed at the mailing address on the bill. The file holds no service addresses, so this shows where the owner gets mail, not where the property is. Hover for names.
Bills by amount band, individuals beside businesses.
Individual customers are anonymized: their rows keep only the amount and mailing ZIP code. Totals exclude the one anomalous bill described below; the median is unaffected either way.
| Group | Accounts | Total billed | Median bill | Mail in 171xx |
|---|
The amounts carry their own findings, and one of them changes every dollar total on this page.
Entity totals here are the amounts exactly as billed, so the anomalous bill is included in its owner's row.
Source. "1381: Oct_Sept 2026 Consumption Bill" billing email list, Original Bills section only; duplicate and owner-duplicate bills are left out. Every original bill has a distinct account number.
Classification. Owners were split into individuals and businesses by keyword, then the full list of names was reviewed by hand. Trusts named after a person count as individuals. "AUM bill-pay client" rows are bills routed through a third-party payment processor, so the real owner is not in the file.
About the "AUM bill-pay client" rows. AUM is American Utility Management, an Illinois utility expense-management firm founded in 1994 and owned by RealPage since 2017. It works for apartment owners and property managers: the utility sends the bill to AUM's lockbox (a PO box in Oak Brook, Illinois) and to an AUM mailbox, AUM audits and pays it, and the cost is charged back to the landlord and often allocated to tenants. On a bill like this the customer name becomes "C/O" plus AUM's client number, so the file names the processor, not the owner. The 206 accounts under client numbers P6311 and P6310, plus 15 under P4512, almost certainly belong to one or two large apartment portfolios, but nothing in the file says which.
What the file does not contain. No service addresses (only the mailing address for each bill), no consumption or meter fields (only the amount due), and no owner behind the 235 accounts routed through bill-pay processors. It also has no summary total of its own; the row count was verified by two separate extractors.
How much of CRW this is. The list is the email-billing list for one monthly cycle, so it covers paperless customers only. A Pennsylvania House press release puts CRW at "more than 18,000 customers" (pahouse.com, archived copy), and the WaterZen utility directory lists about 66,540 residents served (waterzen.hexocean.com), roughly 28,000 households, fewer accounts because apartment buildings share master meters. Against a working estimate of about 20,000 active accounts, the 5,622 bills here are roughly a quarter to a third of CRW's customers. The account numbers' route-and-sequence structure (672 routes, highest sequence numbers summing to about 36,000 numbers ever issued) is consistent with that.
Map. Mailing addresses were geocoded with OpenStreetMap's Nominatim; a few resolve only to the ZIP code centre. Municipal outlines and the river are from OpenStreetMap, state outlines from the US Census via us-atlas.