By Thia James

Monthly water billing could be coming in 2014

Nov 19, 2013 | 5:31 AM

Prince Albert is one vote away from approving a monthly water billing cycle for its residents.

City council will make its final decision at next week’s meeting after the executive committee decided to forward the bylaw amendment, which includes monthly water billing, to council. Currently, water bills are sent out quarterly – once every three months.

The bylaw includes a series of additional updates which allow for monthly billing. The bylaw would change the billing period from every three months to “a period designated by city council,” and it would change the late payment penalty rate to two per cent.

After Monday’s meeting, Mayor Greg Dionne said he’s still on side with the change to monthly billing. “Strictly because all the people that talk to me support monthly billing because it’s so easy to budget. Everyone gets the gas bill, they get the power bill, they get the telephone bill, they get every bill monthly. Except for the water bill.

“And those bills [for] an average household, I’m going to say are $60 to $70. So then, three months later, you get a water bill for a whopping $285, when you’re paying all the other ones $70, $80 a month, you’re used to that. And so, it is hard for families to budget.”

Helping hand

Salvation Army seeking bell ringers for annual Christmas Kettle Campaign

7h ago

Health

First Canadian case of more severe mpox strain confirmed in Manitoba

11h ago

Mail

Canada Post reports $315M Q3 loss, compared with $290M loss a year earlier

Nov 22, 2024

In the report accompanying the amendments, assistant director of finance Brian Parschauer wrote that administration has developed a process to ensure bills are sent out by the 15th day of each month. The public would be given a 10-day window to look for their utility bill in the mail, and it will be the responsibility of the resident to ask the city about their bill if they don’t receive it within that window.

Dionne told the executive committee about widow who paid the city $800 in advance of leaving the city to stay with her daughter for six months. She made the large payment in advance out of fear of returning home to find that her water has been shut off.

After the meeting, he said the ability to pay water bills through the city’s website is the issue. “Like the lady that I ran into the other day – she was leaving – if we had the online banking, you know, she’d be able to pay it.”

But he said he’s now concerned about online payments because he didn’t realize the city budgeted for late/missed payment penalties. “Because if you made it easier to pay, you may get more people to pay, and then your penalties come down. So, it’s one of one, and one the other.”

More people paying on time, coupled with the lower penalty rate of two per cent charged after three months of non-payment, versus 10 per cent charged on one missed quarterly payment are potential factors in such a revenue loss.

Parschauer’s report estimated that the city could experience a $150,000 decline in penalty revenues. The city has been recording penalty revenues of about $250,000 over the past three years.

In order to allow residents to pay their monthly water bills online, a fair bit of security would be required for financial transactions, director of finance Joe Day pointed out after the meeting. “We have enabled that just recently for parking ticket payments online, and we would have to look into it a little more deeply as to how to connect that with our water billing system if we wanted to do what some people are asking, [which] is an opportunity to go right to the city’s website and make their water bill payment right on our website.”

He said there are a few technological obstacles to getting water bill amounts onto a server. However, making an online payment through the banks is available.

The city is also looking at going paperless – that is issuing bills electronically – in conjunction with monthly billing, Day said. “We haven’t determined exactly whether that would mean emailing out statements or whether it would be on some sort of a server such as going to the city’s website to check your bill monthly, that hasn’t been determined. We wanted to really get a determination from council first as to … their direction as to whether they really wanted to go to monthly billing right now or not.”

The added demand for customer service at City Hall’s cashier desk because of the switch to monthly billing would mean that an employee would be needed to staff the second cashier station. That, plus the added cost for envelopes, paper and postage would cost the city an estimated additional $127,000.

During the meeting, Coun. Ted Zurakowski expressed his discomfort with the cost of moving to a monthly billing cycle. He said it’s a large cost, as compared to setting up online billing through the city’s website. “I think it’s a related issue, and I think that’s the one we’ve been trying to capture – is moving to pay online, and somehow, we got away from that towards a monthly water bill.”

The city is also looking to create a pre-authorized billing program similar to Tax Instalment Payment Plan Service (TIPPS), which is allows residents to make automatic monthly property tax payments. Day said they are looking at the possibility of allowing equalized payments.

“So, regardless of whether it’s quarterly billing or monthly billing, we’d like to enable people to make equalized payments towards the city.”

The water meters will continue to be read every three months, with estimates given for the other two months. Day said there would be a mechanism for corrections – in the case of residents whose estimates are higher than their actual readings.

“And, especially at the end of the year, we’d make sure that we were getting everything corrected.”

tjames@panow.com

On Twitter: @thiajames