Montana resident faces $1,000 water bill due to software disaster

BILLINGS — Billings resident Avery Johnson complains she couldn’t believe it when she opened the City of Billings’ latest utility bill.

“That’s most of my salary,” Johnson said. “I have no idea how I’m going to do it.”

Given the new billing software switch billed by the city, Johnson’s water bill went up to $975 over a 60-day period.

However, Johnson questions how this is possible as she is a single woman living alone in her home.
“My bill for May-June was $325, which was to be expected…”

That’s to be expected, because Johnson says he filled his backyard pool in May, but when he called the city to ask for an explanation, they told him there was a leak.

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But Johnson says that’s not possible.

“He wanted me to do a dye test on the toilet and nothing happened, they were new toilets, I would have heard a leak,” she said. “I went into the crawl space, looked everywhere.”

Looking for answers, the woman took to social media to share her frustrations and found that hundreds of other Billings residents were also experiencing strangely high water bills, sharing their own stories of high bills.

“A lot of people are going through the same thing,” he said.

But Billings Mayor Chris Kukulski says there’s an explanation for the high water bills: overuse.

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He says there has been a 29% increase in water consumption in the city

“The problem is we’ve had two very wet summers and then this year it’s been a very hot, dry summer,” Kukulski said.

Kukulski and Public Works Deputy Director Jennifer Duray insist all the invoices are accurate.

“We’re working with everyone on payment because all of this is exacerbated by the fact that people often haven’t received a bill in June,” he said.

But they also admit that something went wrong in the process.

“We’ve had no issues with meter reading accuracy, nothing has changed, but the transition to this new billing system was definitely challenging and that’s what caused all the problems,” Kukulski said.

The city acknowledges that the confusion was caused by the vendor hired to do the transition work.

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According to city officials, the vendor in question is experiencing software programming issues when pulling data from the old system to the new one. That process was supposed to begin in February but has been delayed by issues.

“The delay since February has gotten us to this point, and looking back, we wouldn’t have gone there if we thought we would have these issues,” he said. “This was never about an issue of billing people correctly.”

Duray claims there have been no changes to the meters or meter software, but Johnson and other residents don’t believe that.

“There’s a problem, they switch to a new system and then all of a sudden everybody has these problems,” Johnson said. “Everybody has a leak? Where’s this water coming from?”

Additional details regarding water bills from the city are listedHere.