Bad bills: Is pricey City Light computer to blame?
 |
|
||||||||||
A top official at Seattle City Light yesterday acknowledged that the utility's new computerized billing system — much delayed and way over budget — could be to blame for inflated customer bills.
Known as the Consolidated Customer Service System (CCSS) and intended to improve customer service, it went online a year ago this month. At that time, it was more than a year behind schedule and, at $40 million, cost about twice the original estimate.
"They told us the hemorrhaging had ended and the system was working," Seattle City Councilman Jim Compton said yesterday. Now he's not so sure.
Compton noted that City Light and Seattle Public Utilities, a partner with City Light in CCSS, have asked for still more money at the same time evidence seems to be mounting that the system is behind City Light customers' recent billings that are way out of line with those they regularly receive.
Deputy Superintendent Jim Ritch, who oversees technology at the utility, yesterday said it was possible that CCSS was to blame. "We're still looking into that," Ritch acknowledged.
Compton said that during a briefing earlier this week, Marty Chakoian, the city's information-technology chief, told him a special team had been focusing on the basic sequence of generating a bill — meter, meter reader, transfer of the data to CCSS, bill output.
Compton said Chakoian told him investigators had eliminated meters and meter readers as possible causes of the bad bills. Chakoian did not respond to messages yesterday.
Compton described CCSS as a "persistent, running sore" for the city. If it turns out that the new billing system is to blame for the billing errors, "that's pretty alarming to me," he said.
"My concern is I thought we had an assurance that CCSS was no longer going to be a nightmare for the city, and now it appears otherwise," he said.
Compton noted that the system was clearly still not working right because City Light is seeking more money for various fixes. The request for an additional $1 million was in a $37 million budget-reduction presentation the utility made last week.
Ritch likened the situation to a new homeowner who believed the house was OK to inhabit, "but it might not be good enough for how you want to live in there."
Yesterday, Compton and Councilwoman Heidi Wills, chairwoman of the Energy and Environmental Policy Committee, said they would press for a full accounting of why the utility needs more money and what role CCSS might have played in generating the huge bills.
Wills said the billing problem had shaken faith "in the most important value we could have with our customers — the trust that they are being billed accurately. That's a pretty fundamental principle. It's the most basic arrangement between customers and the utility they own."
In addition, many affected consumers have reported that when they complained, the utility was arrogant and dismissive, insisting the bills were correct and lecturing them about the importance of conserving electricity.
Earlier this week, a Magnolia man filed a lawsuit against the utility to prevent it from shutting off his power while he contests his bill.
The utility is scrambling to find answers in time for a council hearing next Thursday. It hopes to explain why scores of consumers in recent months have received inflated bills — some thousands of dollars too high.
This week, the utility added a new page to its Web site entitled "Something Wrong With Your Bill?" It's at www.cityofseattle.net/light/news/features/memo4.asp
City Light noted it sends out more than 2 million bills each year, and "we will make mistakes on some of those bills." It also invited customers to ask for a supervisor if they don't feel they're being treated right.
The utility knows of about 75 consumers who have protested high bills. It has identified an additional 1,300 who potentially were over-billed because of a nonfunctioning filter intended to weed out wacky bills.
Utility officials have said some customers may be getting higher bills as part of a "truing-up" process to compensate for earlier undercharges caused by bad meter readings or inaccurate estimates.
When it generates a new catchup statement, the utility has billed as if all the consumption occurred during a single billing cycle, increasing the bill because of a three-tiered pricing system adopted last summer to discourage consumption.
The first tier is 4 cents per kilowatt-hour; the second is 8 cents and the third 16 cents. The highest rate is applied to all consumption exceeding 125 kilowatt-hours a day in the winter and 60 kilowatt-hours in the summer.
In an interview earlier this week, however, City Light's Jim Bassen, a senior analyst, said CCSS was modified to account for the three-tier rate structure. If a corrective bill was generated because of bad estimates, CCSS should not have penalized customers by bunching usage into a single billing period, he said.
Yet for unexplained reasons, that is apparently what happened in many cases, the utility acknowledged.
Compton noted that it was not just the bills that are thousands of dollars off that are of concern.
"How can we be confident, because my bills aren't huge, that I'm not being overbilled $3 or $30 and paying it anyway because I don't pay that much attention?" he asked. "We need to have absolute confidence in everybody's bill."
In a $15,000 report prepared for the city last fall, Pacific Consulting Group, a Seattle consulting firm, reviewed CCSS's history and the lessons learned from the project.
Originally estimated to cost $20 million and be done by late 1999 — in time for Y2K — the project suffered from, among other things, a failure to understand its objectives, too many members on the steering committee and the lack of a "systems integrator" to help coordinate "at least eight consulting/contractor firms," according to the report.
Peter Lewis can be reached at 206-464-2217 or plewis@seattletimes.com.