A Dallas Water Utilities crew looks on as a 12-inch water main sprays water from a break in 2021.
From the archives/Dallas Morning News
For the fourth time in two months, Dallas Water Utilities has been called out for doing something that should be impossible for a public utility that is a monopoly.
Keeping the public in the dark.
First came the confusion over a new 3.15% surcharge on certain bill payments. I asked questions. The answers were so murky that my June headline wrote itself: “Dallas Water Utilities ducks questions on payment fees.”
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Then in July the Editorial Board of The Dallas Morning News took a similar stance with this headline: “Dallas residents deserve explanation about water bills.”
You would think that might have gotten someone’s attention.
Now comes another example of a system failure.
After getting weak answers to serious questions, I lectured the leaders saying, “You can still be more forthright.”
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Let me tell you what happened to one Dallas family. The family asked me to withhold their name because they don’t want — pardon the pun — to get in hot water with the city water department. They say they fear retaliation. They did show me their most recent bill for $701 due in mid-May.
The couple uses a lot of water for their big lot. About $10,000 was spent the first five months of this year, they told me. The wife paid the May bill, but then the bills stopped coming. She’d check the website each month, and it always showed she was paid up.
By August, she feared that eventually she’d get a giant make-up bill in the thousands.
“So I called customer service,” she told The Watchdog. “The representative was very helpful, but the short story is the new billing system that Dallas water purchased will not integrate with the old system. So every account is being added manually. The representative told me this was the most — she paused looking for the right wording — interesting event she’d ever been through.”
The wife was told no late fees are being charged, no one will get disconnected and customers will be offered extra time to pay.
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“Hardly reassuring,” she told me.
Verify
So, if true, the customer discovered news.
I wrote to the department to verify her story.
Dallas water officials refused to answer my questions in needed detail.
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Officials insisted they couldn’t talk to me, only the customer. I got the customer to sign a waiver, but that didn’t work either.
The first of two responses I received sounded like a broken record (attention young readers: this is when a vinyl record gets scratched and it keeps repeating a certain line).
Over and over, no matter my question, the answer usually said “DWU successfully migrated more than 340,000 active utility accounts to a new utility billing system.”
Yes, I asked, but how many customers are still waiting for their bills to arrive? And when will they arrive?
What’s the deal with manually imputing?
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I applaud the utility rep who provided information to the customer. I wish leaders could do the same.
After I lectured the two city officials — superintendent Estela Ornelas and chief communications officer Rick Ericson — I received a second, shorter explanation.
In it, they denied there was any manual inputting.
The city folks added, “While approximately 340,000 accounts were migrated successfully, that should not be interpreted to mean that every transition was without challenges.”
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Ah, we’re getting somewhere. Baby steps, but slight forward progress.
Always a struggle
I’ve never seen a utility that had an easy transition from one billing software to another. It’s always a struggle.
That’s why you’ve got to own it. There’s no shame. It happens. But tell us about it. Not just the broken record part, but all of it.
That seemed worth saying because Dallas Water Utilities employees routinely sign their emails with slogans such as “Service first, now!” and “Connect. Collaborate. Communicate.”
Three pretty good commandments.
Here’s the problem: You actually have to follow them.