Escondido council orders billing corrections, approves 14-month backbilling plan after utility error

The Escondido City Council on Sept. 17 approved a package of corrections to residential wastewater bills after staff disclosed a programming error that shifted the billing baseline away from the 2022–23 winter water-use period.

The council voted 5-0 to credit customers who had been overbilled, to lock the 2022–23 winter water-use period for calculating wastewater charges through the current rate cycle, and to recover underbilled amounts by backbilling affected customers over 14 months with a $10-per-unit monthly surcharge.

City staff told council the error came after the city adopted new utility rates in 2023 that relied on an unusually wet 2022–23 winter as the billing baseline. Chris McKinney, the staff presenter, said the billing system continued to update winter averages annually instead of holding the 2022–23 baseline. "The system was not programmed to account for that, and so the computer system did what computer systems do," McKinney said, describing the mistake as human error in system setup.

Why it matters: staff said 24,526 residential accounts were affected in various ways.…