Water Bureau Director responds

Water Bureau Director David Shaff send me the following by e-mail, in response to the questions in my post a couple of days ago. Posted with permission, of course. Jack Bog’s blog carries a further post with more comments, too.

We offer a program that we call “Budget Billing” free of charge for our customers who bill quarterly. Budget Billing takes a customer’s average consumption over the past 12 months and calculates an estimated monthly dollar amount that the customer will be responsible for paying for 11 months. On the twelfth month the customer will receive a true up bill which will either result in a final amount due or a credit depending on how consistent their water usage was to the prior year. The benefit of this program is a more manageable amount due by receiving a monthly statement. Since we read quarterly for our residential customers, in order to create a bill without having a read, the other two months consumption is an estimated amount. In answer to your question about the base charge, they pay the daily rate billed for quarterly accounts. I recently signed up for the program to see how it works. My base charge on my first bill last month was $6.25 for a 29 day period (29 days x $.2155 = $6.25). It is the same daily rate that you paid on your quarterly bill.

Monthly billing is very different. Monthly billing means that we would get a meter reading each month and generate a bill each month for the water consumed. In addition to getting a monthly bill that reflects actual consumption (and is more manageable from a household budget perspective), customers will know sooner that they have a leak or an increase in consumption that they may want to investigate, rather than waiting for two more months to discover they have a problem. Moving to monthly billing will come with a cost however. Instead of sending out 4 bills a year to over 180,000 accounts, we will have to read and bill those accounts 12 times. That will require an increase in personnel or move to technology such as AMR (Automatic Meter Reading), something that many utilities are using nationally and beginning to use here locally. We are just at the initial stages of exploring what the options are, the costs, benefits and drawbacks of those options, and the interests of our ratepayers.

The recent poll on our website did not mean to imply that the bureau was only looking at one option or another. The polling option we were experimenting with only allows one choice; otherwise we would have allowed customers to rank preferences as well. We are actually quite interested in implementing them all if that is what our customers want and/or need. Our reason for polling what our customers wanted most was to help guide us in which initiative to tackle first. Designing, testing and implementing new technology and functionality in our billing system is not solely a Water Bureau function. We communicate our plans and they are discussed and prioritized with a Partner Advisory Committee which consists of members from Water, Bureau of Environmental Services, Bureau of Technology Services, Office of Management & Finance, and the Revenue Bureau. These technological improvements to the billing system rely on the Revenue Bureau and Bureau of Technology Services. We compete for their services with the rest of the City and they are right now immersed in implementing a city-wide financial management software system.

Implementing recurring payments and credit card payments 24/7 by phone has been frustrating and we are behind where we would like to be. But as I said on Jack Bogdanski’s blog, given our history, we aren’t going to implement any new functions until we are sure that they will work properly. We are committed to meeting these commitments and are meeting with the other bureaus to find out when they will be able to start work on our projects.

I hope that provides you with some of the information you were looking for.

It does – thank you, David! ~ Amanda