Need advice on a tenant utility dispute

[Steven Colella]

So I became a landlord when I purchased a four unit building about nine months ago and everything has been pretty good so far. My partner and I live in one of the units and we rent the remaining units out.

In April/May, we started to have some work done on the house. One of the pieces of work included was a complete rewiring of the house to remove the active knob & tube system. This process took approximately 2-3 weeks.

Due to some issues with the general contractor, the service application to have the meters changed over to the new system took almost three months to process and complete. During this time, apparently all but one of the meters had been disconnected - a meter belonging to one of my tenants. This means that, apparently, all four units plus the public service utilities were being billed to that tenant.

I just received a letter from the tenant with their bills from April-August enclosed, stating that they were concerned about the high usage and asked the Public Service Commission to investigate, which concluded that all four apartments' utilities were being billed to the tenant. As an aside, the tenant has also been several days late to pay rent for the last few months, but I am having a hard time faulting them due to the hardship from the increased utility bills.

I'm not a shady guy and I want to make this right, I just don't know the best way to do so. I don't want to just pay them off and have it come back to bite me in the ***. The way I see it, my options are to:

1) Ignore the complaint. I am leaning away from this option.

2) Pay the difference in the electric bills and chalk it up as the cost of doing business.

3) Pay the difference in the electric bills up front and seek restitution from the contractor for causing the delay in the process, which resulted in the lengthy term of higher utility billing to the one apartment.

4) Provide the tenant with the contractor's contact information and invite them to seek restitution directly. I am also leaning away from this option, mostly because I know it won't go anywhere.

Can anyone provide any insight into how you would handle this situation? Again, I want to make things right for my tenant, I just don't know how much of it should be at my expense and how to handle it in a way that will close out the matter completely.

[Account Closed]

How much are we talking about here? Might be just take the difference off next month's rent and be done with it. If it's big money, look at previous monthly bills and prorate the overage to each unit by billing each tenant. Allow something for yourself to cover the public areas. Good luck.