05-08-2013 Council Agenda - Laserfiche WebLink

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from Badger Metering so that the down time can be reduced. They now just need to be programmed and shipped. The new collector was covered under our warranty so there was no cost to replace it. The collector at the Booster Station has had some down time due to power issues, but it acts mostly as a redundancy for the southern part of the City and is not absolutely necessary for collecting readings. Billing & Customer Service The pilling process continues to get easier with each quarter that passes. The first couple of quarters were a learning process, and staff has now written procedures for processing a billing cycle and the entire process for downloading readings from Read Center to the billing software takes about an hour. There are some other operations that need to be completed as well, but, overall, the time spent on billing has been greatly reduced as staff had hoped it would be. A member of public works is being used to collect the readings of opt out meters as well as the meters that haven't been upgraded yet. He is also getting readings from radios that aren't transmitting for whatever reasons on the billing date. The hope is that by the end of 2013 most of those issues will be taken care of and public works will only need to read the opt out meters and a stray meter here and there for various reasons. The customer service facet of the new system has been an invaluable feature for staff, particularly the Utility Billing Clerk. Having the data from each meter right on the computer while talking to a customer has allowed staff to quickly answer questions regarding usage and give the answers confidently. Reports have been printed out and sent to customers upon request to help them understand their usage history. I have personally dealt with a fair number of customers and have been able to show them their usage and help them understand why they were billed what they were billed. The Utility Billing Clerk is using this feature nearly every day, particularly the first couple of weeks after bills are mailed. I have included a sample usage report and graph. 1 run a leak report once a week to check for meters that may have leaks and need to be notified. It's somewhat complicated in that any meter that registers usage for 24 consecutive hours shows up as a leak, but that includes businesses, apartment buildings, and other unique situations where there is always water flowing through the meter. So each week I have to sort through the usual suspects to find the homes and businesses that may have leaks. It took a few months to get used to the data and decide what was a leak and what wasn't but I now send letters out nearly every week. I have also called a few properties if the leaks were more severe, such as 200 gallons per hour. Many of the leaks I see are 10 -20 gallons per hour, which I would guess is a leaking toilet. Sometimes it can be hard to tell if it is truly a leak or not so I err on the side of caution and send a letter. I have told both Badger and Dakota Supply Group that they need to update the software so meters can be excluded from the report if we know they always have water flowing. That would make things much easier. I have sent 42 letters and called or visited in person five other properties. Some of them still show up on the leak report so those people may simply use a lot of water or do not care that they have leak. 2