Short a penny on bill, blind Attleboro woman threatened with lien
News generates outcry, generosity
When her daughter read her the notice, Eileen Wilbur began to sweat. Her heart raced; her blood pressure climbed.
The 73-year-old blind woman could not believe that Attleboro City Hall was threatening to impose a lien of up to $48 because she had mistakenly underpaid her last water and sewer bill by a penny. She couldn't fathom why the city would pay 42 cents for a stamp to collect a penny.
"It made me sick - my adrenaline was really going up," Wilbur said in a telephone interview yesterday of the notice she learned about on Monday. "You can do anything to me, but don't touch my house. I paid for this house with very hard work."
Wilbur, who raised seven children over the past 50 years at her five-bedroom house in South Attleboro, asked her daughter to fax the letter back to the city collector's office with a note that read: "Why don't you use the 42 cents of my tax dollars to clear that up? The lack of common sense is staggering."
When Wilbur didn't hear back from city officials, she went to The Sun Chronicle newspaper of Attleboro, which first reported the story.
City Collector Debora Marcoccio said the letter to Wilbur was computer-generated and sent out with 2,000 other bills for outstanding balances. She said she would have been happy to discuss the bill, but Wilbur's fax didn't include a phone number for her to call.
"We're not trying to be the big, bad bully," Marcoccio said. "I don't want to have to send these things out. It's not a nice job."
But, she added, her job is to collect. "My position is to have payment on their accounts."
With 120,000 bills sent from her office every year, she advises residents with questions or problems to call her. "This way, things don't get blown out of proportion," she said.
As word spread about the penny owed on Wilbur's $45.61 bill, Wilbur said she received a flurry of calls from neighbors offering to help. A local limousine service called and offered to drive her to City Hall.
But before she could take anyone up on their offers, Antonio Viveiros, 62, a former city councilor from Attleboro who never met Wilbur, acted on his own.
He marched into the city collector's office yesterday, but the clerk at the window didn't recognize him. When he said he wanted to pay Wilbur's bill, he said the clerk asked whether he had the bill. "I said, 'I don't need a bill to pay a bill.' "
After the clerk checked with a colleague about whether he could pay Wilbur's bill, he wrote the city a check for a penny.
"I understand these things are computer-generated, but there has to be more compassion in government," he said. "Arrogance is never appreciated."
David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com. 