CORPUS CHRISTI (Kiii News) — City Council members received an update on what's being done to correct some significant problems with thousands of water bills
On Tuesday members learned that the biggest problems involve substantial over-charges or people not receiving any bills at all.
IT consultant Peter Collins was brought in to help the city fix the issues as residents continue to step forward about their frustrations with their bills.
"They say I use thousands of gallons of water a month, I don't even water my grass," resident Pat Meredith said.
"We've got a man to solve this problem, we admit we've got a problem in the billing procedure, but we're on it, and we're going to get it straightened out," Mayor Joe McComb said.
On Tuesday, Collins presented a new updated water bill that city water users will receive one he said will make more sense to customers to figure out the amount due.
Collins said the new update is a significant step to relieve some confusion on what people owe with their bill. Collins also addressed the issue of residents who simply don't receive a statement at all and said some customer profiles had not been entered into the system correctly with information missing.
"What we do first is to be sure you enter a customer profile, there are required fields, if you don't put the information in it doesn't let you do it, that's in place, we had about 800 people affected by that," Collins said.
Collins found a software glitch that caused 4,000 occurrences of bills not being printed even after residents called in to let staff know they hadn't received a bill. Collins fixed the software glitch,
Collins told the council that the city should now see a huge decrease in complains from folks who have not received a bill and encourages people if they still do not still get a bill to call in to identify future issues.