BILLINGS — The City of Billings has begun removing a random sample of water meters from homes to be shipped out for testing on Wednesday as a part of its ongoing audit of utility bills.
This is the next step after SL-serco Inc., the audit firm hired by the city, started collecting readings from 30 randomly selected meters on Nov. 6.
Robin and Tim Allman were the first ratepayers to have their meters replaced after seeing a string of high bills.
“I think it’s been upwards of maybe like three or four hundred a month and some months higher than others,” said Allman. “I did stop the auto billing just because it was automatically coming out every month, and it’s just been high. I don’t want to keep paying that month over month.”
They are hoping Wednesday morning would begin to shed more light on their bill.
“We remove the old meter, and we put in a new meter, and then they send off the old meter to get tested, make sure it’s accurate,” said City of Billings service representative Kevin Gerrells. “They’ll take the meters, run them through a test machine, and make sure that they’re accurate as the water flows through them.”
“They’re covering all the bases on it, so this is, with the mechanical part of it, this is like pretty much the first part of it,” added City of Billings service representative Jeff Weber.
The process took five minutes. Those meters will be sent to SL-serco to be tested by another third-party company that regularly tests water meters.
“We hope to have all of the testing completed yet this year, but it’s not a quick process, so we’re not waiting for the test results to complete the data review. We’re going to continue forward with the data review. If that points us in another direction, that may change the number of meter tests because of what we find,” said the company’s CEO David Allen.
This is the latest step in the city’s audit. In June, the city switched over to a new billing system, causing a delay in bills being sent out on time. After they were rolled out in August, residents reported seeing abnormally high charges.
Despite the outcry from ratepayers, Public Works maintained that their readings and meters were correct.
“We still maintain that the meters are correct and the software is billing accurately. There’s always those one-off human errors, but those are isolated, not an actual software or meter issue that we’ve found so far,” said Deputy Director for Public Works Jennifer Duray in October. “About 95% of our customers have not complained about high bills, so most of our customers are continuing to pay as usual.”
After months of complaints, the city agreed in October to go forward with an audit, hiring SL-serco in November. The firm has so far checked over 30 random meters and are comparing bills from this year to last.
In November, the city admitted to some billing errors. Forty percent of cycle 2 bills, which includes rate payers charged within a certain time period, were found to be incorrect, saying the software made too many estimations.
“The meter readings are correct. The time that the use occurred was not correct and that just was confusion when switching over software. We’re going back and recalculating every one of those bills,” said Public Works Director Debi Meling in November. “We estimate bills almost every month, but usually only a handful, not 8,000,” Meling said.
The audit is expected to be completed by Jan. 31, 2025, and the firm will present the results to Billings City Council during a public meeting.
“Any delay is painful for everybody, so we’re trying to kind of go all directions at the same time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, depending on the results of it, that we do some additional testing afterward or have a game plan beyond,” said Allen.
Residents like the Allmans say it cannot come soon enough.
“My hope is just that they make it right moving forward, but then they also retroactively make it right for those individuals that has significantly overpaid,” said Allman.
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