Some residents got water bills over $1 million in this city near Fort Worth
When Courtney Mitchell opened her water bill earlier this week and saw the jaw-dropping amount of $3.1 million, she did a double-take.
“I started laughing, and showed a picture of it to my husband,” she said
However, Mitchell said the error is a serious issue that she can’t take lightly.
Mitchell’s bill was corrected to $105, but she is still unhappy with the city, saying the rates are higher than they should be.
“It’s concerning what’s going on with the city”, she said.
Ed Fosman, a mechanic for American Airlines, said he and his wife were also upset when they saw their bill of $195,497.46, which is due by April 27.
Fosman, who is an essential employee during the stay-at-home order due to the coronavirus pandemic, said “getting a bill like that doesn’t help right now. The city council needs to be accountable.”
“It’s ridiculous; we got a good chuckle out of it,” Fosman said.
‘The perfect storm’
Kennedale officials said about 200 water customers got high water bills, and those bills have been corrected.
Lakeita Sutton, director of finance and information technology, said Kennedale is in the process of shifting its billing to Arlington after its contract ended with Fathom Water Management, a company that went out of business last fall.
Kennedale already has a partnership with Arlington to handle its water operations and is in a transition of shifting the city’s billing to Arlington, Sutton said.
The billing transition to Arlington was to be completed by June, she said.
In the meantime, Kennedale was using another company, Munibilling, to handle the water bills and a company called Aclara to read the meters.
Then, in February, Aclara informed Kennedale that it was no longer going to read the meters, she said.
Kennedale contacted Arlington to read the meters, but Kennedale is not on Arlington’s system to read the meters yet, so they were read manually, Sutton said. When the information was sent to Munibilling some of the readings showed the decimal point in the wrong place, she said.
“When the problem was discovered on Saturday, Arlington reread the meters and got the reading corrected,” Sutton said.
There were 3,200 meters and 200 were read incorrectly, she said.
However, Arlington officials said in an email to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that Kennedale’s water meters were read correctly.
“Unfortunately, differences in the way manual meter readings are reported in Arlington and in Kennedale caused a number of the readings to be processed for billing with an additional two numerals,” said Traci Peterson, communications coordinator for Arlington Water Utilities. “These numbers, which are to the right of the decimal point on meters, are typically dropped automatically when readings enter Arlington’s billing system. That is not the same billing system used by Kennedale at this time.”
According to Peterson, “the private contractor responsible for Kennedale’s utility billing did not complete an editing process that would have removed those additional digits or flagged the meter readings for further review before bills were produced. As soon as the contractor identified the errors, Arlington worked diligently to confirm what had occurred and help to correct the affected bills.”
Peterson said that in almost all of the cases, the inclusion of the extra numbers from the reading was the cause. “Arlington Water Utilities regrets any inconvenience or hardship these events caused for Kennedale residents.”
For Sutton, “it was just the perfect storm of things. My team has been working all weekend to come up with a strategy to help Arlington troubleshoot.”
“This caused an undue hardship for our residents,” she said.
This story was originally published April 16, 2020 at 5:30 AM.