Jackson: Water billing issues not 'simple'

From sky-high water bills to not receiving them at all, Jackson residents continue questioning the city’s water department while the collection numbers indicate a crisis.

The city is collecting payment for water on roughly 82 percent of its customer accounts. In a City Council meeting Monday, administrators sought to let the city know it’s not as straightforward as one might think.

“Getting the water bills out, it would seem like it would be a simple issue, but there have been several issues that have hindered us from being able to get water bills out, mainly meters that weren’t uploaded properly, and we’ve been trying to work through that,” said Jackson Public Works Director Kishia Powell.

Jackson is suffering a $4.9 million shortfall in its water and sewer contingency fund, which the city is required to keep under its bond agreement. The water-sewer budget has a roughly $13 million deficit for the beginning of this fiscal year alone.

"I’m still frustrated by how it seems as though there’s not solid oversight of the numbers coming out of the Public Works Department," said Councilman Melvin Priester.

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To address the issue, the city is using a report by a company it paid $400,000 to do a top-to-bottom analysis of its water and sewer department. Priester said the company, Washington-based Raftelis Financial Consultants, discovered a number of “humungous” problems with the department, “entirely separate from Siemens.”

The Raftelis report states that the city has neither an “active” nor a “proactive” collections process, a significant yet seemingly simplistic analysis.

Councilman Ashby Foote said it’s a problem the city was made aware of a year ago. And it may be the answer.

“I think it’s really a collections problem that we need to turn all our focus and energy on collecting the money (for services) that the city does,” Foote said. “It’s not like people suddenly in Jackson decided to stop using water. This is a monopoly we’ve got, and we need to collect the money for delivering the product. We’ve had all these billing problems, but we have to get beyond that and collect the money.”

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Powell outlined some specific issues the city has identified and is addressing.

In fiscal 2015, the city charged 22,973 accounts less than the minimum sewer charge, calling it a “misapplication,” which translated to a revenue loss of $1.46 million. Powell said the city has adjusted and corrected the cost on those accounts.

The city identified 1,780 hung or stuck meters that were not calculating consumption and contributed to $431,000 in lost revenue, while 2,382 meters had bad final reads when the new meters were installed, causing a $357,000 loss in revenue.

Other concerns, which could not be boiled down to a monetary value, include meters that were incorrectly calibrated, not properly commissioned or reading water in gallons instead of cubic feet.

“Because the meters were not properly commissioned, that’s the reason were having the billing issues were having today, because we had close to 5,000 accounts that we identified recently that the meter exchange files were never uploaded properly, so those accounts did not get billed,” Powell said.

Customers should expect to receive calls and letters from the administration as they start to get 45,000 accounts on automated water usage reading, so their bills will reflect exactly how much water they use instead of an estimate. Mayor Tony Yarber said he expects all customers to have automated billing by the end of 2016.

Difficulties with meters and the new system aside, Foote questions those in charge of water billing.

“As much as we discuss process, it’s much more about management shortcomings within the Public Works Department that have allowed these problems to persist and in some cases get worse,” Foote said.

Michelle Battee-Day, deputy director of administration, said Jackson’s water-sewer budget shifted from a positive to a negative balance at the end of fiscal 2015, adding that the shortfall was not known about until calculated in mid-January.

This isn't the first time the city has experienced a deficit in its water and sewer fund that it then absorbed, but the fact that the city has a shortfall within its bond obligations signifies a greater issue.

At the close of the fiscal year in October, Battee-Day said, “some things happened that pushed us into the negative."

“Just from an accounting standpoint, the departments were not using purchase orders in order to encumber funds that they were anticipating spending, so when you looked at it from a finance side, we could not see that that money was tied up so we thought that we had a positive balance,” Battee-Day said. “We have had some internal discussions to make those corrections, and the departments are going to be using purchase orders in the future.”

Priester noted the difficult job the Public Works Department is tackling on a daily basis. “A ton of hard work is going in by your folks,” he told Powell.

“The operation who was saddled with the brunt of the work to make this performance contract work has been trying to fight those issues and at the same time handle day-to-day operations to get people billed,” Powell said. “With the change over to the new billing system, that exacerbated the issue.”

The city is also discussing ways the city’s policy regarding its water service can be altered to make collections more aggressive.

It could revise its code to allow customers just one bill adjustment — when they have a leak that they then fix, for example — per year. The council also discussed charging late fees, which the city currently does not do.

“One of the things that Raftelis has identified here is that we don’t have any mechanism beyond shutting people’s water off — which people will turn their water back on — to make people pay their bills,” Powell said.

Other states have laws that allow municipalities to hinder residents from getting their car tags renewed if they have outstanding water bills. Jackson’s attorneys said the Mississippi Legislature would have to enact such a law for that to work locally.

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And then there’s the issue of straight piping — where residents hook up illegal lines to the city’s water to get a free supply.

Powell said the city has ordered special locks that will stop those who try to steal water from hooking up their own line to the water meter pit, though Powell believes it will be an ongoing issue since some are piping around the pit.

“There’s nothing that keeps people that don’t want to honestly pay for water from going right back out, removing the meter that was installed and putting in another straight pipe,” Powell said. “Last week we had an issue where the person pulled it three times.”

But not all residents who get their water for free are happy about it.

“There are people that are begging for a water bill that haven’t gotten one in months and months, I mean begging for a water bill because they don’t know what the consequences might be for them because we’re not billing them,” Councilwoman Margaret Barrett-Simon said. “One man told me that he had direct draft for his water bill … and it had been found out that they had not been drafting the amount from his account. We’ve got a very serious problem, and it’s just bizarre to me that something that appears to be so simple can’t be fixed — getting water bills out and getting them out correctly or getting them out at all.”

Contact Anna Wolfe at (601) 961-7326 or awolfe@gannett.com. Follow @ayewolfe on Twitter.