Editor’s note: After repeated phone calls to city hall were unanswered and never returned, The Register went to the Lexington website and pulled off a statement from city manager Todd Finley.

Over the past few weeks, our staff has been working long days — and even a few late nights — to process utility bills by verifying meter readings and comparing them to our billing software. It didn’t take long to realize there was a system issue generating inaccurate statements. We quickly reached out to the software technicians to help resolve the inconsistencies.

Several years ago, the city purchased automated meters for both water and electric service to collect customer data more efficiently. However, the system involves multiple software platforms:

1. The meter software (Company A)
2. The billing statement software (Company B)
3. The translator software that links the two (Company C)
4. The customer portal for viewing and paying online (Company D)

Somewhere between reading the meters and generating the statements, something went wrong. We enlisted industry experts from all vendors involved, who have been working closely with our staff for the past few weeks to identify and resolve the issue.

To make a long story short, many final bills had been either estimated automatically or manually adjusted. Continuing this way would have eventually caused a catastrophic failure of the entire billing system. Once we realized major corrections were needed to get all the software communicating properly again, we knew it would delay our regular posting dates.

I made the decision that it was better to be late than to send out inaccurate readings — a tough call, knowing it would cause frustration for some customers.

As of August 7 at around 6 p.m., we were finally confident enough in the corrected numbers to post statements. We understand that some customers may see higher or lower bills than normal; this is common after a correction of this kind. A few commercial accounts were even significantly different.

To help ease the impact:

• No late fees will be charged for this billing cycle.
• No services will be disconnected this month due to billing issues.

Moving forward, the company that worked alongside our staff will continue to assist us for the next couple of months, monitoring the system and creating a plan to simplify operations and prevent future issues.

If you believe your bill is still inaccurate, we encourage you to call or visit City Hall so we can review your account. We ask for your patience — in some cases, we may need to take your name and number and follow up with you next week.

On behalf of the city, I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Being upfront with our citizens — even with unpleasant news — is something you should expect from your city staff and leaders.

Todd Finley
City Manager
City of Lexington