Liberty Utilities is cooperating with the office of Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin in an investigation into its billing practices, Liberty officials said Wednesday.
Griffin announced the investigation March 10, acting on a complaint filed by White Hall Mayor Noel Foster.
“We were faced with some problems, but we acted professionally and honorably, and we’re not afraid of answering questions,” said Tony Penna, president of the Central Region for Liberty’s water division. “The goodwill doesn’t fear to have them.”
During a quarterly Citizens’ Water Advisory Council meeting at Liberty’s Pine Bluff office, Liberty customer service supervisor Candice Kelly addressed the issue of customers showing zero usage on their water bills.
“We went and modified some meter reading sequences to increase efficiency there,” Kelly said. “We are offering payment plans for those customers, and those customers will not have late fees on their invoices.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
A “small pocket” of customers were not transferred onto Liberty’s customer information system when it was installed in 2023, Kelly said. Once a customer is added, she said, that person will receive multiple bills, which she said Liberty does not want to see happen. Customers in this predicament are asked to contact Liberty and make payment arrangements.
“Again, (we’re) offering payment agreements for those bills, whatever the customer may need, and no late fees for those individuals,” Kelly said.
Kelly blamed the zero-usage bills on tolerance limits that she said were set too conservatively, leading to large volumes of billing exceptions that Liberty’s billing team had to mark manually.
“If we were going to put a check on everyone’s cars to see who was speeding, and we set the threshold at 80 mph, we’d get a few,” Penna said, explaining tolerance limits. “But if we were too restrictive and we set it at 40 mph, because we really want a lot of data, we’d get a lot of people going over 40 mph. We did that. We wanted to make sure we caught as much information as possible, and we got more than we bargained for.
“But you get that data and a person has to go through it to validate, we had more data than we had people capable to do it. So, we charged ourselves and inconvenienced the customer for a while.”
Roman Diaz, operations manager for Liberty’s Pine Bluff office, said customers will have a balance because each one has a charge just for a meter.
“There’s a service charge that is showing, but the usage is zero, plus the other charges in Pine Bluff — for sewer, for instance — are on there because we bill them for that,” Diaz said. “The bill is always going to have a balance, whether you use any water or not.”
In addressing the investigation, Penna said Liberty has shared in “much greater detail” information the attorney general’s office requested.
“As they send data requests for us to fill in the blanks, we will answer those, and we are tentatively scheduled to go back and meet with them the first week in May,” Penna said.
Kelly assured the public that customers’ concerns have been heard.
“We are committed to addressing the issues and improving the service that we deliver because you are important,” she said.