It’s not a quick process, but one step at a time as the city of Jackson continues to take steps to build and install a new water/sewer billing system.
During its April 13 meeting, the city council reallocated $175,000 from the budget for the Water Sewer Billing Administration to hire eight contract workers for the Water Sewer Billing Administration office, purchase supplies to keep the current water meters operational and buy plumbing supplies that were low due to the winter storm.
The temporary hires would address the staff shortage and supplement vacant positions while the reorganization of the Water Sewer Billing Administration is under way. The temporary workers would also help increase customer service capabilities, ensure sufficient staff is in place for data clean-up and ensure customers receive reminder letters about bills that are due.
“It’s important to consider with the water, sewer and business administration, quite honestly and simply put, we have a lot of balls in the air,” said Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba. “One of those issues is the fact that we’re trying to take on corrective measures to make sure that there’s consistent billing.”
Problems date to 2012 when the city invested $90 million in a new metering and billing system from Siemens Industry, and it began to fail almost immediately. Savings of about $122 million over a 16-year span were projected but losses as much as $24 million a year in uncollected water and sewer revenue resulted.
The city settled with Siemens for about $90 million in 2020. About $8.7 million from the settlement is being used to update the billing system.
Rebuilding the city’s water sewer billing system, so that accurate bills are sent to customers is necessary so the city receives the revenue it should.
A bill that passed in the 2021 legislative session that would give the city of Jackson greater flexibility in collecting disputed and delinquent water and sewer bills will be helpful to the city, Lumumba said. The bill awaits the signature of Gov. Tate Reeves.
The bill would allow the city to eliminate uncollected debt from its books, provided a customer has paid a portion of a disputed or delinquent bill. As it stands, the city cannot write off uncollected debt because it is prohibited by law.
The bill applies not just to Jackson but any city in the state with a population of 150,000 or more. The bill allows a city to establish a program to address disputed or delinquent water and sewer customer accounts, taking into consideration a customer’s ability to pay the full amount of the disputed or delinquent claim.
The Jackson Water Sewer Billing Administration is currently not disconnecting residents but instead sending reminder letters to customers that owe balances, Carla Dazet, deputy director of public works for the city of Jackson, told council members at the April 13 meeting.
At the end of 2021, the city expects to be at full capacity and receiving all of the revenue it should. Gone will be the days when some residents received grossly inaccurate water/sewer bills and others went months without bills because of faulty billing.
Lumumba told the city council at its Dec. 22, 2020 meeting that the updates are needed because the current billing software is at the end of its life and cannot be updated. “Even if we didn’t have the challenges we have, we would have to replace the billing system,” he said.
Partners include a project manager, who works exclusively in the field of automated meter systems, and Mythics Inc., a systems integrator, consulting firm, managed services provider and an Oracle resale partner that represents the Oracle product line across cloud, software, support, hardware and engineered systems.
On Dec. 22, 2020, the city council approved a $6.9 million contract with Mythics to handle the installation of $1.6-million worth of Oracle software.
In January, the first phase of the new system, which is upgrading software and creating a digital self-service portal for customers got under way. That was expected to take six months.
In July, the second phase of the project, which is meter device management, will begin and is expected to take until September to implement. Meter device management involves converting the vast amount of data delivered by the smart metering system into information for bills.
The system works like this: Each water meter is equipped with a wireless transmitter that sends a signal to a receiver, which is located on a telephone pole, and then a collector, which is located on select water towers. Each collector sends in a set of readings for a particular part of the city to the meter device management system.
One problem with the Siemens system was that it assumed a customer was no longer at a location if a reading wasn’t obtained from a meter three times in a row.
The third phase of installation of the new system will be testing to make sure everything is operating as it should. The system includes 56,000 water meters, 1,200 repeaters and seven repeaters.
For about six months, the city will operate two water/sewer billing systems as it brings on a new system and phases out the old one.
In 2020, Mythics was awarded a $7 million contract from the city to move water/sewer billing system from the city’s old servers and put in the Oracle cloud environment.
Another part of the process will be a new human resources plan that will be put in place for the water/sewer billing department. The old servers in the water billing department took up to 14 hours to run one of the city’s eight ledger of bills, which amounts to 12,000 bills, and now that same task takes about 45 minutes.
