At a city commission work session earlier this month, Fin. Dir. Kevin O'Leary said the city of Bartow sent out bills for $2.9 million for water usage in the past month, an amount equal to a little less than $400 for each of the city's 7,500 water customers.

That's slightly more than 10 times the average monthly bill. The city's typical monthly billing is $260,000, O'Leary said, an average of about $35 per customer.

The major part of the error has been traced to a single bill, which was made out for more than $2 million. It was caught in an errors and exceptions report in late June, and was corrected before it went into the mail, O'Leary said in a memo to City Mgr. Joseph J. DeLegge.

But it was early July before the correction was posted to the city's general ledger, and by then, the books had been closed for June. So the financial report showed that the city had billed over $2 million more to its customers than had actually been billed, O'Leary said.

In a memo to DeLegge explaining how the error occurred, O'Leary said that when the city converts to an in-house billing system, such errors will be detected easily and quickly. That conversion is under way.

At the Aug. 5 commission work session, O'Leary reported that one customer had gotten a $35,000 water bill. That was just one of those mistakes that slips through the system every now and then, DeLegge said.

zwire

-- Anonymous, September 03, 2002