We wrote about residents’ difficulties in enforcing the settlement of heat consumption costs according to heat allocators for 2021 from Bolesławianka Housing Cooperative in the article “They fought with the Cooperative over settling heating costs according to heat allocators”. More and more people are complaining that the Cooperative’s charges for heating homes and hot water are inflated and pulled “out of thin air.” Residents who have heat allocators installed do not want to pay inflated bills calculated according to the floor area of their apartments. They know how much heat they used and can roughly calculate the costs they should incur for heating and hot water.
Our reader is in this situation. As the owner of a metered apartment, like other owners, she had for 10 years settled the costs of heat supplied for central heating and hot water according to heat allocators (55%) and the apartment’s floor area in square metres (45%). On behalf of Bolesławianka Housing Cooperative, the company Metrona Polska had for years handled the settlement of heating costs and advance payments made toward heating. However, the settlement of costs for 2021 submitted by the Cooperative showed that the heating costs had been calculated as for unmetered premises—that is, taking into account only the apartment’s floor area. This resulted in a considerably higher bill. According to the reader’s estimates, the difference between her calculations and the costs submitted by the Cooperative is PLN 700. For this reason, the reader challenged the settlement she received and demanded that it be recalculated in accordance with the Settlement Regulations she had signed with Bolesławianka Housing Cooperative.
When she received the Cooperative’s response to her demands, she wrote to us:
“I received a response to my letter, which shows that they knowingly robbed me. They did not inform us that settlement was impossible (through heat allocators—editor’s note), because people would not have saved energy. In that case, I’m going to court”
In response to our inquiry about the matter, we received a brief reply from the president of the Cooperative’s management board:
“On behalf of the Cooperative’s Management Board, I inform you that all residents (…) who submitted letters to the Cooperative concerning the settlement of central heating costs for 2021 received individual responses in their mailboxes.”
Beata Ślęzak, President of the Management Board
However, the information reaching us indicates that people received the same letter, not individual ones as the Cooperative claims. The letters differ only in the recipients’ details.
“I am currently preparing a final pre-litigation demand for the return of the advance payments collected for central heating, in accordance with my settlement, because the Cooperative did not challenge it,” says the reader. “I will write about deliberately misleading people and, essentially, extorting money. Deliberate and conscious action, conscious fraud—as far as I’m concerned, a loss of trust in the administrator. Action inconsistent with the legal authorization, because the residents’ resolution was different. The problem is that people who had to pay extra for heating are now satisfied and pleasantly surprised because they received a small additional charge, even though they heated a lot,” the reader adds.
We will return to this topic.