07/30/01

SCOTT LEARN

If you think you've got the ultimate water bill horror story, you haven't heard J. M. Mercurio's.

Mercurio, a Northeast Portland bookkeeper, didn't get a bill with water use details from May 2000 until this July, thanks to the much-publicized problems with the Portland Water Bureau's new computer billing system.

For most of that time, unbeknownst to her and her roommate, a slow leak was quietly spraying the underside of their house. After finally getting her bill and seeing an inexplicable jump in use, she called in a plumber, who found water leaking from a 1/2-inch slit in a PVC pipe -- and more than $50,000 in damage.

Today, Mercurio has almost no kitchen floor, half of her living room floor and a partial family room. She is staying at a hotel while contractors hired by her insurance company work on her house.

To top it off, she also got a call recently from the bureau warning her that her $895 water and sewer bill is overdue and that her water could be shut off if she doesn't pay.

"I'm irate now," the former carpenter said last week as she stood beside her gutted kitchen. "But if they shut off my water, I'll be more than irate. They haven't seen me when I really get mad."

Many reasons for frustration Mercurio's case is extreme, but she's not the only frustrated bureau customer. Complaints range from bills delayed for as long as 16 months, confusing credits and back charges, to the difficulty of getting details out of the Water Bureau.

Hold times on the bureau's customer service lines have dropped but still stand at an average of 15 minutes for "full-service" or relatively complex calls, spokeswoman Ross Walker said.

The frustrations are likely to mount as the bureau figures out the remaining computer problems, sending out more bills with hefty past-due balances. Already, an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 accounts are carrying past due balances, as much as a fifth of the bureau's customers.

The bureau is aggressively pursuing collections to minimize an estimated loss related to billing system problems of $10.1 million to $15 million. The bulk of those estimated losses is expected to come from customers who don't pay up.

Bureau officials say they're getting a handle on the problems, though the progress is slow. As of July 23, the system was having trouble generating bills for 10,887 of the bureau's 185,000 accounts, bureau officials said, slightly down from 11,569 as of June 30. The bureau's best-case goal is to have 99 percent of its accounts billing correctly by Aug. 31.

Some manual labor Automatic debt collection, which automatically sends warning notices, is broken along with the billing system, which was installed in February 2000. But the bureau has shifted dozens of workers to call customers with past-due balances and send out manual notices. Weekly cash collections have topped the bureau's best-case scenario in two of the past three weeks.

When it comes to collecting cash, the city wields a heavy hammer: the power to shut off water supplies. The bureau is shutting off about 20 accounts a day, Walker said.

Bob Durston, chief of staff to Commissioner Erik Sten, who oversees the Water Bureau, said it's unfair to paying customers not to aggressively pursue past-due accounts.

"We will work with folks who because of our errors have accumulated a large bill," Durston said. "But for folks who have gotten their bills and chosen not to pay them, we want to be more aggressive. The lost revenue will come back and hurt all of us if we don't collect."

The bureau's approach rubs some customers the wrong way.

Gary Greenstreet of Northeast Portland said he never got a promised booklet of payment coupons for installments on his past-due balance, though Walker said bureau records indicated it was sent in March.

After receiving a recent shut-off warning, Greenstreet said he called the bureau to find out where his coupons were and was told he needed to pay regardless of whether he had received them or not.

"None of us ratepayers caused this; it's their problem," Greenstreet said. "Now they're not even apologetic about it."

Payment plans Bureau officials say they're trying to accommodate customers. Customers who have not received a bill in six months or longer can request an interest-free payment plan for as long as 24 months that spreads out their old bills and their estimated new bills.

But the payment plan option hasn't done much to soothe Mercurio. She wants the bureau to pay her $500 insurance deductible and other uncovered costs related to the leak, which she said remained disguised for months underneath her thick floorboards.

Durston, Sten's chief of staff, visited Mercurio's house recently and referred her to the city's risk management department. The Water Bureau did knock down her bill from $1,162 to $895 to adjust for the leak.

"It was significant damage," Durston said. "But it's a tricky liability issue. I couldn't really answer what liability the city may or may not have in this situation."

Mercurio said she called the bureau three or four times after realizing in summer 2000 that her bill was delayed. She said the bureau's customer service representatives couldn't detail her water usage, saying the computers were down. She's also frustrated that no one from the bureau called to warn her of a potential leak, given her soaring water use.

Walker said the bureau did set up a payment plan for Mercurio in January, and the representative should have been able to give water use details then. Roughly 1,300 bureau customers are now on coupon payment plans, she said.

Meter readers and account representatives do try to notify customers when they see increased water use, she said, including hanging notices on customers' doors. But she said there's no indication in bureau records whether a notification was made in Mercurio's case.

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-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001

Answers

Of course they failed to mention that their
billing software was updated to avoid the
chaos from running their previous non-
compliant legacy software.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2001