Almost 700 customers of the San Diego Public Utilities Department had money wrongly withdrawn from their bank accounts in recent days, as city officials acknowledged the latest blunder in a long-running series of missteps for local ratepayers.
San Diego officials announced the damage to customers who rely on the utility’s auto-pay service on Tuesday, one day after The San Diego Union-Tribune asked the Mayor’s Office about the improper billings.
The news release, which came three weeks after the San Diego County grand jury issued a unflattering report on the city’s Public Utilities Department, said 690 customers were wrongly billed in recent weeks.
City officials blamed the errors on a contractor and said all of the incorrect billings had been resolved.
“We took immediate action to address this mistake, and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that customers have experienced as a result of this issue,” Jonathan Behnke, the city information technology director, said in the statement.
“Over the past year, we’ve been focused on improving customer service and communication with San Diegans,” he added. “The Department of IT is implementing processes that will ensure this type of issue never happens again.”
The news release did not say how much money was wrongly taken from customers who signed up for the auto-pay service. But NBC 7 reported that one ratepayer had almost $25,000 withdrawn from their account.
Problems with the utility’s auto-pay function are not the only issues confronting the city. In April 2023, a succession of San Diego ratepayers complained about getting bills stretching into the thousands of dollars. Most of them had had their bills suspended as a result of anomalies reported in their water usage, only to receive whopping invoices months later.
City officials blamed the backlogs on persistent staffing shortages, and as recently as last fall, they said they were making sweeping changes to the Public Utilities Department. Those upgrades include a new billing system, updated customer-service software and a new policy that alerts customers when their bill is being withheld pending a leak investigation, officials said.
©2024 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
