Karen Gleason
Several changes to the city’s utility billing procedures, prompted by vocal public outcry over irregular bills earlier this year, were unanimously approved Tuesday by the Del Rio City Council.
A special committee appointed to review the city’s utility billing processes made the recommendations approved by the council. That committee was seated after a contentious Feb. 20 meeting between the council and citizens upset over problems with their utility bills.
Members of the committee included Mayor Bruno “Ralphy” Lozano and Councilman Alfredo “Fred’ Carranza Jr., as well as five citizens chosen at random from a group that had volunteered to serve, including Tomas Cerna, Randy Grace, Ramiro Guzman, Jennifer Avery King and Susana Perez. City staff members also served on the committee.
Carranza said committee members “put in a lot of work” to come up with the recommendations, and he asked fellow committee member Guzman to brief the council on the work done by the committee.
The committee learned, Guzman said, “a lot of the issues, although not all of them, had to do with the systems issues that were created by the cyber attack (on the city’s computers), with different months being billed at different times and causing inconsistencies for users.”
Guzman said the committee’s first recommendation is for the city to have “clear rules and policies about what customers can expect.”
“The (utility billing) department has already made several changes internally, but as far as council goes, we would encourage council to keep insisting on transparency,” Guzman said.
The changes approved by the council were made to Chapter 29 of the city’s code of ordinances and included the addition of a section on water leak adjustments, a section implementing a payment arrangements policy and a section implementing a written past due account policy.
When Lozano asked for council members’ comments, Councilwoman Diana Bejarano Salgado had questions about language already in the ordinance, and City Manager Matt Wojnowski said the special utility committee concentrated its efforts on the language to be added to the ordinance, not on the language already there.
Wojnowski suggested the entire ordinance be reviewed and cleaned up.
Lozano asked the council approve the recommendations by the utility billing committee and that the entire ordinance be brought back before council for further discussion later.
