The Milwaukee City Council held a study session on September 11, 2025, to discuss two major agenda items: a presentation on utility billing and assistance programs, and a comprehensive update on the Capital Improvement Program (CIP), including project prioritization criteria and a proposed sewer line relocation project. The meeting included detailed presentations from staff, council member questions, and direction for future actions.
You ready? Yeah, Nicole's turning on the recording. We're good to go. All right. So study session today, starting with presentation on utility utility billing and assistance. Michael, I was born in Amy Randis. Thank you. We wanted to throw into, but um, we're just trying to limit our presentation to 20 minutes and open it up in 20 minutes for all questions. I wanted to start by saying that a year ago, this position was unfilled. And also it's a face of the city, and like there's a lot of conversations that we're having with residents in utility billing. Somebody that's patient, uh, has hard conversations with people, and does it with grace, and I am static that she's here. So I'm glad that she's here, and you guys get a chance to talk to her and see how great the person she is. Um we just kind of want to tell a little bit about what utility billing does, what administrative tools we have, uh, what the monthly shutoff process is, what our utility assistance program is and how that works, what other external outside uh resources we have, what other cities are in our uh region are doing that are our size and how we compare to that, and then kind of a little bit of how different things that we do, how those impact the utility rates going forward. First off is I kind of put this together, Amy and I, on a what her duties are. And there's different stages in the month. There's the beginning of the month, the middle of the month, the end of the month, and at the beginning, you can kind of read through it. She was doing fast due notices and calls. Um of this I'll get into a little later, but we contract with an outside firm meter readers that goes out and reads physically reads our meters. We don't have an automated system. Um so we're doing that. Um, we're in touch with uh commercial businesses for we have things called deduct meters, and um some of our customers, our commercial customers, we have to contact them to give us the support those. Uh we run aging reports, I shouldn't say we maybe. And uh we also contact uh customers uh who are on the past due notice. So that's kind of the beginning of the month stuff, which flows into our mid-month. Uh we're we do uh an abnormal uh consumption reports. If somebody is way above like a threat zero or at over 10 CCF uh per month, we kind of do an analysis of hey, is this normal? Is this a correct read? Is there a leak? Something like that. Uh we prepare uh for the shutoff process, which we'll get into. Um we submit uh all accounts uh for leak checks and adjustments for our approval process, and then we also send um people to pass due to collections. Mike, just before you go on, I think one thing on that abnormal consumption report, like I think the meter readers is because this is all annual process, there's human error. So, yes, it could take point to a leak, it could point to a misread, and there's a staff capacity challenge then of our public work staff going out to verify those potential misreads. So um I'm just gonna briefly highlight some of these, but we go through and we get the meter read file back, we do an audit of that, make sure everything looks good. It's kind of to Emma's point. When meter readers reads it, if it's a misread or a leak, then public work steps in, and then our staff goes out and has to take time out of their day to go and reread the meter or to look and see if there's a leak. So that's more uh burden and administration on the city and public works. Um sense of how many months that averages. I would probably say 15 to 20. And as far as misreads and rereads. Um lead checks, I would probably say estimate maybe 10. Um meter checks. Sorry, for terminology, but it's when the meters don't want a reading. I would say, you know, maybe there's 15, 20 of those. So when you add them all up together, it's a lot of things. Quite a few of them extra. Yeah, service orders for the scrum. And this is for another conversation, but something that Peter and I talk about is AMI meters and exploring that. A lot of other cities in the region are going to that. It's an initial cost uh capital investment.