photo by: Journal-World illustration

A City of Lawrence utility bill is pictured in a photo illustration.

An issue with some of the city’s new automated water meters resulted in three commercial utility customers being overcharged close to $164,000 on their water bills over the past several months.

The City of Lawrence has been working to replace its old water meters with automated meters, which capture and transmit usage data digitally instead of requiring manual reads. A particular issue with certain retrofitted commercial meters resulted in $163,834 of erroneous charges on the three accounts, which has since been refunded or corrected, according to a city staff memo to the commission.

City Manager Craig Owens provided a report on the corrected billings to the City Commission as part of its meeting Tuesday. Owens told commissioners the issue had to do with a technology incompatibility on the retrofitted meters, and that the city worked closely with the affected customers and is taking other steps to address the problem.

“We’ve done multiple levels of mitigation, not only to catch anything else that might have been a mistake but then also to put processes in place as we transition these meters to make sure that this doesn’t happen again,” Owens said. “But we wanted to disclose that to you, and we wanted to make sure the public understood that we found a problem and we corrected it.”

The issue with the commercial water meters had to do with the registers, which is the device that records the units that are measured by the meter. Specifically, the type of register installed in certain retrofitted meters was incompatible and continued to register water flow at an incorrect rate, according to the memo. Five accounts were found to have the same issue, but two of them did not have any usage. The memo states that the higher-than-usual reads were caught in the city’s normal exception process, but after further investigation, it was believed the meters were providing accurate reads.

So far, 1,700 meters have been installed by RTS, the company the city hired to install the new meters, and the memo states the register incompatibility did not affect any residential meters. The faulty registers were installed on the three commercial accounts in June 2021, and the city discovered in January that the meters were giving inaccurate readings.

City Commissioner Brad Finkeldei said that he got a few calls about the issue, and that in addition to addressing the technical problems with the meters, the city also needed to address the customer service aspect of the issue.

“There were some pretty significant bills that people were receiving for several months that they tried to get rectified,” Finkeldei said.

Owens said that he could not agree more, and that it was not the level of service that the city expected or hoped to provide.

The memo outlines an improvement plan that calls for utility billing and the Municipal Services and Operations Department to communicate regularly on any anomalies they encounter to ensure that all water meters are billed accurately. The plan also states that from now on, meter tests will be implemented when utility billing and MSO detect any reads that may be incorrect, as indicated by usage that is significantly higher than normal, without any obvious signs of a leak.

The memo states that city staff completed a manual review of consumption totals in the billing system on all residential and commercial accounts that recently had new meters installed to identify any potential significant increases in consumption, and that no additional concerns were found. As part of the plan, city staff will also work closely with RTS to ensure that the correct registers are installed for all retrofitted commercial meters going forward.