Over the past 18 months, more than 28,000
Columbus water customers have soaked the city
for a total of $8.2 million in unpaid bills.
Water officials hope that will end Monday when
the first shut-off notices since May 1999 begin
appearing in mailboxes.
The Water Division stopped sending the notices
automatically while it installed a new computer-
billing system that is at least 18 months behind
schedule and, at a cost of $10 million, about $4
million over budget, said Jeff Hubbard, the division
administrator.
"We couldn't get our system to run. There are bugs in
the new system that we had to fix,'' Hubbard said.
. . .
"We had to get involved in this to be Y2K compliant
and to have a more flexible system,'' Sens said.
The Columbus Dispatch
-- spider (spider0@usa.net), November 21, 2000