After months of delays and inconsistent water bills, Colorado city resolves issues

For months, residents in the City of Englewood have expressed confusion and concern due to inconsistent water bills and delays in receiving their bills after the city transitioned to a new billing system last year. The city said all those issues have been resolved.

Pieter Van Ry, the Director of Utilities with the City of Englewood, says the physical bill that customers were getting in the mail wasn't displaying the correct information, and the information that was there was confusing to understand. He acknowledged and understood that this has been frustrating for everyone.

"We understand that this has created a significant amount of frustration and confusion for our customers," said Van Ry. "For the City of Englewood, we want to apologize for our customers' challenges through this process, as we have tried to get this rectified and fixed, and we appreciate their patience." 

Van Ry said the city launched a new billing system last summer to replace an aging system that had been in place for more than two decades.

"We wanted to bring forward a more modern system that a lot of customers understand their bill more and create more transparency into the charges on their bill," said Van Ry.

However, as the transition happened last summer, they immediately experienced problems. The bill wasn't displaying the correct water consumption numbers

"The consumption graph was not displaying information correctly, and there were no water consumption numbers that were there during the testing of the system," said Van Ry. "Something happened in that transition between when we were in the test space, to when we sent out the live bills, to where that information disappeared. That created a lot of frustration and confusion for our customers."

As they were rolling out the new billing system, they were also modernizing and replacing meters, which also led to delays in capturing the data. While the city was trying to fix it, they delayed sending out bills.

"The customers who may have been expecting to receive their bill and the first week of the month weren't seeing it until the third or the fourth week of the month, and so that created problems for them as well," said Van Ry.

Van Ry said the city received thousands of phone calls over the last half year from customers asking questions. Now, they're back down to their normal call volume as the issue has now been resolved, and bills are back on schedule. Van Ry also added that during the transition, no errors were made in what customers owed overall.

Englewood water customers like Maria Salazar said it's been a frustrating transition overall.

"Our bill has skyrocketed," said Salazar. "It's gone (our water bill) from anywhere from $60 to $80 every other month to almost like $250 every other month," said Salazar.

However, she believes her water consumption has remained the same.

"I was like 'wow, what did we do here? Did we use that much water?' No, I don't think so."

Salazar showed CBS Colorado her most recent bill, where you can see the discrepancies from last summer and fall.

"I think there was one month when we didn't even get a bill, and we thought it was kind of weird, but we didn't think anything of it. So then when we got the first bill, that was kind of high," said Salazar. "It's still quite high, just because we've fallen behind a little because of it going up so much."

While challenges like this were ongoing, the city did suspend late fees and shutoffs from fall to early spring of this year. Those have since resumed.

Customers like Salazar still have their concerns, though.

"It's very frustrating," Salazar added, who also said she's had problems logging into the online portal to pay her bill, too. "I hope that it's improved. I hope it gets better."

Van Ry encourages customers who have concerns or questions about their bill to give the city a call.

"The goal overall was to give customers more understanding of their water usage and more transparency. It's really part of a larger effort to modernize all aspects of the Englewood water utility. We're there now. It was just a really bumpy road getting there," said Van Ry.

Van Ry said the city has done a lot of work to figure out what went wrong during the point of transition last summer. They also met with the city council on April 21 and did a 1-hour study session. If people are interested in learning more about the transition, what they're doing now moving forward to ensure customers have transparency in their bill, they can watch the study session on the city's website.