Water bill spikes from last summer should be smoothed over this month

Kerry Overton, the deputy general manager and chief customer compliance officer at Austin Energy, which operates the Utilities Customer Service Office, reminded the Austin Energy Utility Oversight Committee on February 28 that back in October 2017, his team noticed an unusual spike in escalation calls related to September water bills. According to him, after all was said and done, 17,000 customers experienced the pattern of low August bills followed by high September bill. 7,400 of those customers found themselves billed at a higher tier due to the alleged quantity of water they consumed during that period. In the last five months, Austin Energy in conjunction with Austin Water has made a herculean effort to correct this widespread error. “Fairly close to about 100% of those customers have (begun) to already see the credit on their bill,” said Overton. Letters of notification about the credit have gone out and Overton expects that the “bill smoothing” process should be complete by March 15. However, he noted that “If we still receive customer calls (related to the matter) … we will still do that beyond that time period” to issue corrections. To avoid this snafu in the future, Austin Energy has hired a new vendor to do meter reads citywide, and they are requiring them to take a photo of every meter to confirm that their read was accurate and that the meter reader was on-site. Nevertheless, despite all of this effort, Austin Energy has still not identified the root cause of this problem.