\u201cDallas residents deserve explanation about water bills.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\nYou would think that might have gotten someone\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n
Now comes another example of a system failure.<\/p>\n
After getting weak answers to serious questions, I lectured the leaders saying, \u201cYou can still be more forthright.\u201d<\/p>\n
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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\u2019t want \u2014 pardon the pun \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d check the website each month, and it always showed she was paid up.<\/p>\n
By August, she feared that eventually she\u2019d get a giant make-up bill in the thousands.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I called customer service,\u201d she told The Watchdog. \u201cThe 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 \u2014 she paused looking for the right wording \u2014 interesting event she\u2019d ever been through.\u201d<\/p>\n
The wife was told no late fees are being charged, no one will get disconnected and customers will be offered extra time to pay.<\/p>\n
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\u201cHardly reassuring,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n
Verify<\/p>\n
So, if true, the customer discovered news.<\/p>\n
I wrote to the department to verify her story.<\/p>\n
Dallas water officials refused to answer my questions in needed detail.<\/p>\n
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Officials insisted they couldn\u2019t talk to me, only the customer. I got the customer to sign a waiver, but that didn\u2019t work either.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
Over and over, no matter my question, the answer usually said \u201cDWU successfully migrated more than 340,000 active utility accounts to a new utility billing system.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yes, I asked, but how many customers are still waiting for their bills to arrive? And when will they arrive?<\/p>\n
What\u2019s the deal with manually imputing?\u00a0<\/p>\n
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I applaud the utility rep who provided information to the customer. I wish leaders could do the same.<\/p>\n
After I lectured the two city officials \u2014 superintendent Estela Ornelas and chief communications officer Rick Ericson \u2014 I received a second, shorter explanation.<\/p>\n
In it, they denied there was any manual inputting.<\/p>\n
The city folks added, \u201cWhile approximately 340,000 accounts were migrated successfully, that should not be interpreted to mean that every transition was without challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Ah, we\u2019re getting somewhere. Baby steps, but slight forward progress.<\/p>\n
Always a struggle<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve never seen a utility that had an easy transition from one billing software to another. It\u2019s always a struggle.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why you\u2019ve got to own it. There\u2019s no shame. It happens. But tell us about it. Not just the broken record part, but all of it.<\/p>\n
That seemed worth saying because Dallas Water Utilities employees routinely sign their emails with slogans such as \u201cService first, now!\u201d and \u201cConnect. Collaborate. Communicate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Three pretty good commandments.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the problem: You actually have to follow them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Dallas Water Utilities crew looks on as a 12-inch water main sprays water from a break in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":408118,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103],"class_list":["post-408117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/408118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}