Amarillo residents frustrated by months of utility billing problems may finally be getting closer to some answers, but for now, plenty of questions remain.
On Tuesday, the Amarillo City Council heard another update from city staff on water usage and customer service performance as officials continue examining problems that followed the city's transition to a new water billing system in April.
That transition has been anything but smooth. More than 55,000 Amarillo customers received larger-than-normal bills after the change, leaving residents trying to determine whether those increases reflected actual water use, billing problems or some combination of factors.
City staff presented a closer look at August bills during the council meeting. The review included customer-billed water consumption, overall system water production and demand, weather conditions and historical usage patterns.
So far, however, the city has not identified one explanation that accounts for every customer's experience.
“We are still seeing some utility bills come in that don’t mirror what the usual usage has been and so we’re still digging in,” Mayor Cole Stanley said. “We have identified several problems, several things that we are researching further and we will get to the bottom of but we don’t have one consistent issue.”
That distinction is important. Water bills can vary for legitimate reasons, and citywide statistics cannot necessarily explain what happened with a particular household's account. At the same time, customers who have received bills that appear dramatically different from their normal usage deserve an understandable explanation of how those amounts were calculated.
The good news is that an outside review is already underway.
In June, the City Council approved spending $85,000 on an independent third-party audit of the utility billing system. The money is coming from funds that had originally been budgeted for replacing the system's software. Officials expect the audit report to be presented in October.
That report now carries considerable importance.
City staff can continue investigating unusual accounts, comparing water production with billed consumption and working to improve customer service. But after months of billing concerns, an independent examination provides an opportunity to determine what went wrong, what did not go wrong and what changes may be necessary.
As one speaker put it during the council discussion, the public needs answers rather than continued uncertainty.
“The most important thing is giving answers to the public that we now know. That’s the answer. I think the issue is has been still answers that come with we don’t know,” the speaker said. “And so that third-party report should be on our desk here within a short period of time somewhere in October. And we need answers.”
Meanwhile, the city has another immediate challenge: dealing with the people who are already calling for help.
Staff said August brought both increased water consumption and higher customer contact volumes. Officials say their priorities include strengthening staffing, shortening customer wait times and improving overall service.
Those improvements matter regardless of what the audit ultimately finds. When residents have questions about a basic city service — particularly one involving potentially hundreds of dollars from a household budget — reaching someone who can clearly explain the account should not become another source of frustration.
The October audit should provide the City Council and residents with a clearer picture of what happened during the billing-system transition. It may reveal multiple contributing factors rather than one sweeping problem.
Whatever it finds, the most important next step will be transparency.
Residents should be able to see what problems were identified, how many customers may have been affected, what corrections are needed and what the city plans to do to prevent similar problems in the future.
