Shady Meadows Owner Pays $8,150 to Restore Water After Partner Misses Bill

Water service was cut off for residents of the Shady Meadows Mobile Home Park in Cibolo, Texas, for more than 24 hours this week. Treva Carpenter, a co-owner of the property, identified a missed payment by her business partner as the cause of the outage.

Carpenter stated that an unpaid water bill of $22,000 has accumulated since 2023. She told KSAT that this debt contributed directly to the shutoff. The lack of running water affected long-time tenants, including Julie Phillips, who has lived in the park for more than 20 years.

Phillips contacted Carpenter on Tuesday to report the issue. Carpenter then reached out to the City of Cibolo to determine the steps needed to restore service. The city agreed to turn the water back on after an arrangement was made to pay $8,050 by Wednesday. Carpenter also committed to paying $6,000 in utilities by the end of the year.

Carpenter said she paid the city $8,150 from her own funds to satisfy the immediate obligation. Phillips expressed relief that the water was restored but voiced concern about future outages. "I hope it stays on so we don’t have to move anywhere else, because we don’t have nothing saved up or anything like that to get out of here," Phillips said.

Carpenter noted that several tenants are currently behind on their rent payments. She said these arrears, which amount to thousands of dollars for multiple renters, make it harder to reduce the total $22,000 utility debt. Tenants discussed the possibility of a foreclosure on the property, a claim KSAT was unable to confirm.