CARLTON FLETCHER: City officials get one chance to correct billing-gate

Baby, you can do it, take your time, do it right.

— SOS Band

Given all that’s going on in this community, you would think that the outrage over Albany utilities officials’ handling of January utility billing would be little more than a tempest in a teapot.

But, as folks much wiser than I have noted over the years, “You go messin’ with people’s pocketbooks, you’re goin’ to hear about it.”

There are any number of issues and problems floating around the Utility Board’s billing practices in the wake of the Jan. 2 and Jan. 22 storms that devastated the community. The decision to use average billing based on customers’ past three months of bills was a logical one, given that downed trees and storm debris blocked access to thousands of customers’ properties. There was also the all-hands-on-deck order that had many employees who typically handled meter reading involved with more critical tasks.

When those averaged bills came out, and people who had been three days, a week, 10 days, two weeks and more without electricity saw bills that were around the same as — and in some cases higher than — recent bills, well, the proverbial poo hit the proverbial fan.

City Manager Sharon Subadan explained the billing-average process to Herald reporter Jon Gosa for a story that ran in Wednesday’s Herald, and she went over it again in painstaking detail with the Albany Utility Board on Thursday.

But there was a vital step left out of the process, and it’s that step that caused such a commotion.

Subadan told The Herald — and she reiterated this point during her conversation with the Utility Board — that a message had been sent out with all January bills explaining the process for coming up with that month’s bill total. She said a copy of that message had been included with every bill mailed out to the utility board’s 35,000 or so customers.

Unfortunately, it appears a whole lot of people either disregarded the note or, in the case of many, never got it. Subadan said that the company responsible for mailing out city utility bills had been instructed to include the note explaining the billing process, and Utility Board member Sam Sneed said Thursday that he was “surprised” by his higher-than-expected bill “until I read that note that explained why averaging had been used.”

A number of people who were contacted by The Herald, and others who contacted the newspaper in the aftermath of stories explaining the city’s billing process, declared they had not received such a notice. Herald Digital Editor Brad McEwen opened his bill in the newsroom, and there was no notice inside.

I know without question that many people who are still in an uproar about billing-gate, even after a reasonable explanation has been given, are the kind of people who deal in teapot tempests. They’re the ones who look for any opportunity to proclaim that corruption bleeds from of every level of government, especially local government.

Like the boy who cried wolf, their hollers of discontent typically fall on deaf ears.

But city officials made a grievous mistake when they failed to better inform the public about their decision to average the January utility bills. Surely they had to know that a customer who’d gone 10-15 days without electricity was not expecting a bill that looked a lot like the last three they’d gotten, when electricity was flowing uninterrupted for 30-31 days.

Sending out a notice in bills — even if the billing company had included a copy in every bill — was simply not enough. Too many people ignore inserts in their bills on general principle, so it’s a logical deduction to assume that many would not see such a notice, even if they’d gotten one.

Logically, city officials should have used the media — whose representatives proved to be more than willing to pass along any vital information to the community — to get the word out about the billing. A forewarned constituency is a constituency that would have been a lot less likely to be up in arms over a matter that, again, given what’s gone on in the community in the past four or five weeks, was not a huge deal.

In her conversations with The Herald and with the Utility Board, Subadan offered assurances that bills will be “trued-up” in February, that all meters will be read and that overages paid in January will be accounted for in February. Not wanting to go all voice of doom and gloom or anything, but if I’m a city official and I have any say in billing come next month’s cycle, I’d have folks checking and rechecking each bill to make sure all meter readings and charges are 100 percent on the dot.

It’s a stone guarantee that some people are going to complain no matter what, even if they read the meter along with whatever employee does that job. It’s just what they do. But if the next billing cycle proves not to live up to expectations, jobs could very well hang in the balance.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.