It would sure be a shame if some mischievous neighborhood tyke also jumped the fence some night and took a pipe wrench to that expensive smart meter. The city would then have to come out — at its own expense — and replace it. It would be even more terrible if the replacement meter suffered the same fate. And if hundreds of other Smart Meters were also repeatedly vandalized. It might even make the city think twice about their insistence that every home have one.
And that would sure be a shame, wouldn’t it?
It wouldn’t be necessary to break the meter; simply blocking the signal would suffice. A couple of hundred people doing this randomly (in a town of 200,000 people) would do it.
You could tie up the bureaucrats with a staff just to fix that.
The problem of course, is that they’re spending your money to fix something you don’t even want.