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Alpine staff recommend switching utility billing software to CUSI, council told
Summary
City staff recommended CUSI as a replacement for Alpine's utility billing software, citing reliability, smart-meter compatibility, mass-notification capacity and recurring payment options; council discussion centered on cost, data migration and financial-software integration.
City staff recommended that Alpine replace its current utility billing system with software from CUSI after a year-and-a-half review, saying the vendor offers features the city’s current platform does not and would improve customer service and internal operations.
Staff presented the recommendation during the City Council meeting Feb. 17, saying CUSI demonstrated support for smart meters, online and phone payments, recurring ACH drafts with no customer fees and mass notifications by phone, text and email. Carmen Rodriguez, the city’s customer clerk supervisor, told council the current portal regularly locks users out, double-posts payments and produces inconsistent bill-credit information.
“The system we have is no longer sufficing,” Rodriguez said. “We urgently need something that works better.”
Rodriguez said the top benefits offered by CUSI include: smart-meter compatibility; an online customer portal with 12-month usage graphs and year-over-year comparisons; recurring ACH drafting with no fees; optional card readers for in-office payments; a mass-notification tool that can send geo-targeted messages and report delivery status; and document scanning linked to customer accounts.
Rodriguez and other staff discussed price and implementation during the meeting. She reported an estimated CUSI onboarding cost of $32,950 and an annual maintenance fee of about $34,824, numbers she described as higher than the city’s current annual spend of roughly $19,000–$20,000. Council members asked how much of the city’s existing data would be migrated and how to avoid importing corrupted records.
“We would have to pull over some of the data,” Rodriguez said, noting Alpine has about 4,000 water and gas accounts and manual reentry would not be feasible. Staff recommended migrating a limited set of historical records (for example, account status and recent meter reads) and running a multi‑month mirror period before going fully live.
Council members emphasized the importance of integration between utility billing and the city’s financial software to reduce manual CSV imports and reconciliation errors. Rodriguez said CUSI supports CSV and API exports and that the vendor has worked with other local governments on financial integrations. Megan (staff) confirmed finance staff would prefer an API-based integration to avoid daily manual imports.
City Manager (unnamed) told council that the city has budgeted $50,000 in the current fiscal year to begin the transition and that staff plan to return with a formal recommendation for council action.
Council did not vote on procurement at the Feb. 17 meeting. Staff said the next step is a council authorization to proceed with the recommended vendor and to begin contract and implementation planning.
