By Tyler Marr

City discusses means to recover unpaid utility revenues

Dec 11, 2017 | 9:54 PM

A move to tack unpaid utility bills onto the tax bill of property owners or landlords elicited widespread unease among city councillors and was ultimately sent back to administration after a rigorous debate.

The city is owed upwards of $160,000 in unpaid utility accounts each year, and currently has nearly $800,000 out to collection agencies dating back to 2013. Council and staff are working to devise a plan to recover this lost revenue.

The option presented is one a number of other municipalities across the province resort to when an account falls into arrears. However, the idea was heavily seen around the table as just “passing the buck” to someone else and had various holes shot through it Monday night.

Kicking-off the rotating rounds of rebuttal was Coun. Ted Zurakowski, who believed there were other options out there, such as a move to monthly billing. The city already has plans to implement a small-scale run of monthly billing starting Jan. 1.

“I think we sort of found a solution through the back door by moving to monthly billing,” he said. “What I am concerned about is passing the buck to landowners or owners of rental units. That will cause many other issues. Some we can guess, some we may not be aware of.”

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Some councillors suggested mirroring the practice of other utility companies, by multiplying the hookup fee for users who burn them. The city currently has a “hit list” for bad accounts and requires previous costs be covered before new hookups are complete.

Equally uneasy about the idea was Mayor Greg Dionne, who pitched another solution: allowing Visa. Currently, the city does not accept Visa or other credit card options for utility payments. 

“We are talking about collections,” he said. “We could unload… $200,000 of that to Visa…. When some people come to pay, they don’t have the money but they do have the credit.”

A move to accept Visa, however, would see a two per cent fee charged to the city. While not fond of forking over cash to the credit company, Dionne “sure don’t like writing off $800,000 when I think we can collect a quarter of that from Visa.”

Another area of worry surrounded passing the responsibility of the bills onto landlords, many of whom already grapple with difficult endeavours merely to collect rent. Adding to this, city staff explained renters made up a large chunk of those not paying utility bills.

Dionne told the story of landlords who are already at their wits end. He heard from a few who said passing the tenants obligation onto them would trigger them to sell their properties and move on.

This was worrisome for Coun. Don Cody and Blake Edwards who stressed how “we need landlords in this city” and kicking them further would be poor judgement.

Coun. Terra Lennox-Zepp pointed out how other cities, such as Saskatoon, only add the outstanding accounts onto tax bills as a last resort and use the idea as more of a practice than a steadfast policy, and suggested learning from this.

After comments from every councillor, some of whom called out residents saying they “could get more done” if people simply paid their utility and tax bills, it was settled to send the idea back to administration to find other solutions to recover the cash.

tyler.marr@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @JournoMarr