Pickens officials say water billing errors affected about 25% of accounts; vendors engaged to resolve

City administrators told the Pickens City Council on Aug. 25 that a transition to a new automated water meter reading and billing system led to erroneous consumption bills for roughly 25% of customers.

The administrator said the new system combines remote meter-reading hardware and a new software workflow and that the city is operating the old and new systems concurrently during the transition. "About 25% of our customers were impacted by erroneous bills that went out," the administrator said. Staff have reversed erroneous charges for affected accounts where they could verify the error and committed to having vendors and staff reconcile the full data set before resuming full billing.

Staff listed the vendors they are working with: Master Meter and Consolidated Pipe (hardware/AMR/AMI vendors) and Harris Local Government Software (billing / data aggregation). Representatives from the meter vendors were on site last week and were expected back in the city during the week following the meeting to continue troubleshooting.

The finance director said the city is taking a customer-first approach: pending invoices will be adjusted so customers are charged only the minimum verifiable amount while staff and vendors work to reconcile consumption data and billing calculations. City staff said they expect further updates once vendor diagnostics and data reconciliations are complete.

Ending: The council received the status report and asked staff to continue reporting progress; no formal action was taken during the work session.