Agenda

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13.

City Council Regular Meeting

Meeting Date:

01/26/2021

BACKGROUND

Staff wants to review the current practice on handling of overdue utility accounts with council before any changes occur.

Previously, the City would send out a late and penalty notice to citizens who missed a payment on their utility bill. Those customers would be given 10 days to pay their water would be turned off. The Meter Technicians would be called out to residences each month to turn off water for non-payment and staff found this to prompt those residents to pay their utilities.

Once COVID-19 started, staff stopped doing turn offs to help customers that were negatively affected by the pandemic. At the time it was unclear how long and how large the effect the pandemic would have on the community.

The longer the pandemic went on, some residents began to not pay their bills. This was expected and hopefully allowed those customers to instead pay other necessary bills while they weathered the crisis.

Now staff has noticed some accounts with much larger balances. There is a concern those accounts may find it difficult pay back the balance even after the pandemic passes. This is an unitended side effect of the prolonged nature of the pandemic.

Simply writing this amount off could be considered a gift of public funds and not a good solution. Staff has begun to reach out to those account with larger balances to see if they are willing to enter into a payment contract or at least agree to paying 20% of their bill each month to slow the growth of the balance. No accounts are being turned off at this time.

Staff is considering resuming turn-offs for those not affected by COVID and encouraging those that are to commit to paying part of their balance each month to make it less of a burden when the economic pressures start to ease.