Liberty Utilities tells Aurora council it is prioritizing well generators and customer alerts as service-line failures rise

Liberty Utilities representatives told the Aurora City Council on Aug. 12 that the company plans to improve coordination with the city to avoid cutting newly paved streets, is prioritizing installation of generators at critical wells and is rolling out a customer-notification platform to speed boil-advisory notices.

Jordan Bullinger, senior manager of key accounts for Liberty, introduced the company’s team and handed detailed technical questions to Eric Larson, Liberty’s senior manager for water operations. Larson acknowledged the company’s outreach had lapsed and said emergency repairs sometimes force short-notice cuts, but he offered a practical fix: schedule an annual meeting once the city finalizes paving projects so Liberty can plan preemptive service-line work.

That proposal responded to repeated complaints from council members that streets get paved only to be cut again for water repairs within weeks. "If we know you're going to do a particular street, I have no problem putting that project together to take care of it before you pave," Larson said. He explained that many repairs are to customer service lines — the shorter-lived connections between mains and meters — and that replacing groups of service lines in a single block is often more efficient than repeated spot repairs.

Larson said Liberty has seen an uptick in service-line failures over the last two to three years and recommended a formal engineering analysis and flow testing to inventory asset ages and materials. He described recent winter incidents in which frozen equipment and a failed tank transducer led to pressure loss and a temporary system outage; crews restored service but the events highlighted weaknesses in some meter pits and older materials.

On emergency preparedness, Larson said Liberty launched a program to install permanent generators about 18–24 months ago and is prioritizing single-well systems and sites that serve critical institutions. "We're going to prioritize the wells that serve the hospital area," he said, and added Liberty will stage one or two portable plug-and-play generators devoted to Aurora as interim protection.

The company also addressed slow public notices during a past boil advisory. Larson described a customer-notification tool (OnSolve) the company uses elsewhere and said Liberty plans to roll it out in Aurora, with a target of the end of the year. "That is our goal," he said, adding that the company will coordinate registration and the preferred contact method with city staff.

On data and billing, Liberty said it is rewriting the SAP-based reports used for sewer-billing imports and expects testing on a corrected report by the end of the next month; the company said a developer (referred to as Jo John in the meeting) is reformatting meter identifiers to match the city’s spreadsheets to reduce manual fixes.

Council members pressed Liberty about costs and existing repairs. Larson said the company has been spending roughly $25,000–$30,000 per month recently on service-line replacements in Aurora, while a single contractor repair can range from about $2,000 to $5,000 depending on whether the street must be cut. He offered to share Liberty’s heat‑map of repeat-cut locations and said Liberty will gather counts of replaced service lines on request.

On the electric side, Charlotte, Liberty’s central-region regulatory manager, explained the currently pending electric rate filing with the Missouri Public Service Commission and told the council the proposed overall electric increase in the filing is 29.64%. She said the filing uses a historic 12-month test year and a longstanding PSC formula that accounts for operating expenses, transmission and distribution investments, long-term debt costs and the allowed return on investment. "Empire did not design that formula," she said, adding that the company filed to recover expenses and investments placed into service since the test-year cutoff.

What’s next: Liberty said it will coordinate an annual planning meeting with the city on paving and service-line priorities, provide the council with data on repeat-cut locations when collected, continue work on billing-report fixes, and pursue generator installations and customer-notification rollout per its capital budget priorities.

The council did not take formal action on Liberty’s investments or the rate filing at the meeting; those matters proceed through regulatory and internal utility processes.