Don LepardAttorneys have unleashed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that EPB violated Tennessee’s False Claims Act by knowingly submitting inflated bills for its streetlights, overbilling Chattanooga taxpayers for an amount that remains in dispute.
Plaintiff Don Lepard, who filed the sealed lawsuit against EPB on behalf of the city and state, is seeking more than $10 million in damages for what he says is an average 27 percent rate of overbilling rate among EPB’s 46,000 lights, including nearly 27,000 that belong to the city.
Lepard, owner of Global Green Lighting, is a former contractor for the city who helped replace a third of the city’s lights with more efficient LED models. But the city declined to renew his contract, based in part upon billing and maintenance information supplied by EPB that Lepard and City Auditor Stan Sewell have since disputed.
The dispute traces its roots back to EPB’s admittedly defective billing and record keeping systems, which caused the utility to erroneously charge city taxpayers to power thousands of lights that had long since been removed from poles or replaced with newer, more efficient lights. EPB claims that while it may have overcharged the city for energy use, it underbilled the city for some of the replacement costs for lights that were installed but not charged to the city.
The lawsuit claims that when Lepard informed EPB about the problem in 2011, the utility began changing its books rather than reimbursing the city for the mistake. Lepard charges that it wasn’t until news reports highlighted the billing problems that Mayor Andy Berke ordered the utility to sort out its books that the utility began acknowledging that it had overbilled taxpayers.