Mere steps from the best city park in the state, Anita Ash and her friends in the Utility Office go about their business. The non-descript midcentury building, once part of the city’s long-gone power plant, still teems with activity. Within its walls the dedicated staff track all the accounts, bills, and expenses for four utilities – Electric, Water, Sewer, and Stormwater. Last year alone they mailed and collected over ninety-six thousand utility bills. Yeah, ninety-six thousand. Lay the envelopes end to end, and they would stretch from here to Loogootee. That’s 5,344 for each of the department’s eighteen employees.
As you can imagine it’s a big job to keep track of thousands of customers – hookups, turnoffs, transfers, and service calls. There were over 180 shutoffs just last year. Although the utilities share many of same customers, each is a bit different. Electric is the most expansive, serving about 6,500 customers including Montgomery. Many of the water system customers are also outside the city limits, while the sewer/stormwater utility is more confined, with a limited number of outside customers.
Fielding customer concerns is a big part of the job – billing questions, service complaints, or just “how do I get service.” If you want to build and need power, you call the utility office. If you buy a house, you call to get your water turned on. If you have an outage or a complaint, yep, you call the utility office, and for every one of those 96,000 bills, there is a payment to be processed. I guess that will get us back from Loogootee.
Many customers pay their bills in person, either at the utility office or at city hall downtown. The drive-thru line at the park is often backed up like the lunch line at McDonald’s. Others pay by mail, and increasingly, credit card payments have become popular. First accepted in 2011, with about 100 transactions a month, eight years later usage has grown to 400 credit card payments a month.
Utility billing is just part of the job. The office also keeps track of each utility’s expenses. Although they seem similar, water utilities are different from electric utilities which are different from sewer utilities. Each has its own regulations and procedures. Together the utilities have ‘plant in service’ worth more than one hundred and fifty million dollars. Tracking those costs is one more thing they do in the utility office.
Luckily, recent technological advances have made their task a bit easier. In the not so distant past, we dispatched meter readers to read each water and electric meter. That’s more than eleven thousand in total. They would visit each meter and write the readings into a meter book. Back in the office, those readings were manually transferred into the billing software. Every month the process was repeated. It was tedious, time-consuming, and prone to error. Today the city has switched to radio read meters which have eliminated transcribing errors. Anita said that the city’s electric and water meters were old and needed replacing, and the city wanted to consolidate the systems for reading the meters and billing onto one platform.
Today the utility office staff can monitor usage and report issues to customers in near real time, like leak monitoring. When algorithms in the software detect abnormal changes in usage, the account is flagged for the utility staff to investigate. If they agree that the usage is questionable, they call the customer. I got one of those calls a while back. They had detected unusual night time flow – a new toilet tank seal and all was well. Power usage can be checked as well. Recently they helped a customer with a brownout problem. It’s incredible what they can do.
Of course, new technology always comes with an expiration date. Just like with your personal computer the software must be updated. Sometimes the vendor will no longer support older software versions. That has happened with some of the software, which will require the utility office to transfer to a new program. That is always a trying and time-consuming effort, but the dedicated employees have planned for the change, and I am confident they will work through it – just another day in the office. As I write this their biggest challenge, however, will be retirements.
Last week assistant office manager Brenda Mullen retired. She was a valuable resource that had been with the city for 29 years and will be missed. In June, office manager Anita Ash will also retire. It goes without saying that her retirement will be keenly felt. Since she started in 2008, Anita has shepherded the office through unprecedented changes in meter reading and billing technology and represented the city with the Indiana Municipal Electric Association. She is rightfully proud of those in her office, as everyone is dedicated to serving the public. She is confident that Stacie Anderson will do an excellent job as her replacement.
It is incredible what this office does to keep Washington a great place to live. Thanks for doing such a fantastic job.
David Dahl
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