Delinquent utility customers could face disconnections, resolve problems sooner

Rowlett residents who fail to pay utility bills may soon find their utilities cut off faster, but they are also likely to resolve utility problems more efficiently through changes presented to the City Council at a work session Tuesday.

The city may turn off utilities 30 days after they go unpaid, but utility cut-offs only happen on two Wednesdays each month. Director of Finance and Administration Brian Funderburk explained that the city will cut off utilities Monday through Thursday every week beginning Oct. 1.

"This will allow us … to manage that process a lot better,” Funderburk said. “One of the concerns we have right now is the number of calls we get essentially in a two-day period. It's a considerable amount of work that we do in a very short period of time."

Under the current system, the “two to three days every two weeks that staff performs service disconnections are absolutely frantic,” according to a report presented to council. Most of the city’s 2,500 monthly utility calls occur during this short time frame, and walk-in traffic and phone calls are three to four times higher on disconnect weeks.

Customer service suffers during this time, as calls are often dropped and city employees have less time to spend with each customer. By spreading out the disconnection days, the employees will be able to spread out their workload over a number of days.

"We believe that if we spread this out better it will reduce the number of calls per day,” Funderburk said. “We'll be able to get to our customers a lot faster, we won't have as many dropped calls if any, and we'll also be able to get to more people on the reconnect list, which right now we're not able to do.”

The change will also allow city workers to disconnect more non-paying residents. Each month, the city sends out about 4,400 delinquency notices, which includes about 23 percent of all accounts. More than 80 percent of customers who receive a delinquency notice pay before service is disconnected, but the city only has time to disconnect about 300 accounts per month of 760 potential disconnects. By cutting off utilities four days of every week, the city expects to cut off 640 accounts per month.

One meter reader will also be available to reconnect utilities every day. All payments received in the office by 5 p.m. and online payments received by 4 p.m. will be reconnected the same day. Payments received at a drop box will lead to restored service the following day.

The city mails delinquent customers a notice two days after the due date, then places an automated phone call two nights before a scheduled disconnection. Under the new system, the city will make these calls daily to accommodate the increase in disconnect days.

In the future, the city hopes to enhance service by improving technology on the Web site to allow increased methods of payment and adding an interactive voice response phone system that will allow residents to make payments by phone after they are notified of a delinquency.

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