QC condo residents demand answers as Maynilad threatens water disconnection over P1.3M bill

On a Saturday night in late June, hundreds of residents at Smile Citihomes Condominium in Quezon City learned that their water could be shut off. Maynilad Water Services had issued a disconnection notice demanding nearly 1.3 million pesos for unpaid bills. The residents had been paying their monthly dues faithfully. They had no idea why they were now facing the loss of water service.

They flooded into the condominium's administration building, angry and seeking answers. The board of directors, they demanded, needed to explain what was happening and why. Some residents called for the board members to resign. The situation grew heated enough that Barangay Kaligayahan Captain Alfredo Roxas arrived with police officers to maintain order. When Roxas urged the board to come downstairs and face the residents, they refused. "Your questions have not been answered," Roxas told the crowd in Filipino, his frustration evident. "Unfortunately, they refused to come down."

The root of the crisis lay in a decision Maynilad made in early March. The water utility had reclassified Smile Citihomes from a residential customer to a semi-business customer, citing alleged commercial activities on the property. This single administrative change transformed the monthly water bill. In February, residents were accustomed to bills around 143,000 pesos. Beginning in March, that figure jumped to over 577,000 pesos per month—a fourfold increase. By the time Maynilad issued its disconnection notice in late June, the disputed charges had accumulated to nearly 956,000 pesos.

The condominium's structure made the situation particularly precarious. Smile Citihomes has only one water connection to Maynilad. The utility delivers water through that single main line, and then the condominium's administration distributes it to individual units and collects payments from residents. When Maynilad threatened to cut that one connection, it threatened water to hundreds of people. The board had made partial payments—331,983 pesos in March, 342,835 pesos in April, 335,362 pesos in May, and 342,000 pesos in June—trying to keep the water flowing while contesting what it viewed as an unjust reclassification. But the gap between what Maynilad demanded and what the board was willing to pay kept widening.

The board moved quickly to challenge the reclassification. It filed a formal complaint with the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System Regulatory Office, the government body that oversees water utilities in the metro. The board argued that the rate change was unreasonable and that the condominium should be restored to residential classification. In response, the MWSS issued a hold order—a legal directive that temporarily prevented Maynilad from disconnecting the water service while the case was being reviewed and investigated. That hold order, issued just before the June 25 deadline, stopped the immediate threat of disconnection.

But the underlying dispute remained unresolved. Residents had no clarity on whether the reclassification would stick, whether their bills would eventually return to previous levels, or how long the hold order would protect them. The board had taken what it called "all legal steps" against what it described as an unreasonable increase, but legal steps take time. In the meantime, hundreds of families in a medium-rise condominium in Barangay Kaligayahan were living under the shadow of a potential water cutoff, waiting to see whether a regulatory office would agree that their home had been misclassified, or whether they would have to accept that their water costs had fundamentally changed.