According to the Santiago Water and Sewer Corporation (Coraasan), nearly 100,000 users do not pay for their water in the province. The executive director of Coraasan, Silvio Duran, told Diario Libre that the water company has around 250,000 registered customers. Nonetheless, he said that the clients with meters totaled about 135,000 while more than 95,000 are unmetered and do not pay for the water service. He said that in order to tackle this situation, Coraasan had decided to identify the nonpaying users and employ a policy of rapprochement and negotiation in order to get them to pay a minimum fee. He said that most of those who do not pay live in the poorest barrios.
He added that a survey they conducted found that 88% of those consumers would be willing to pay as long as the fee is reasonable. Duran stated that they have begun to work on a new study aimed at starting negotiations through more than 350 neighborhood associations located by Coraasan. He pointed out that the nonpaying consumers include people who owe a lot of money to Coraasan but that a way will be found to reduce these debts in order to convert them to paying clients. Coraasan is currently pumping 110,000,000 gallons of water per day, while the daily demand is for 135,000,000 gallons, so they are facing a deficit of between 18 and 20 million gallons daily.