The Finance, Debt & Budget Oversight Committee met on Wednesday, January 28, 2026, at 4:00 PM in City Council Chambers. The meeting focused on December 2025 financial reports, a progress report on delinquent DPU bill collections, and ARPA fund status. Chair George Sarantou presided with six members present. Key discussions included $10.57 million collected in past-due utility payments, income tax revenue trends, and the need for more detailed ARPA expenditure plans.
Regular monthly meeting of the Finance Debt and Budget Oversight Committee will come to order and the clerk will call the roll. Saranto here. Driscoll? Here. Gaddis? Yeah. Hobbs. Jones. Here. Martinez. Five present. Excellent. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone on this warm sunny day. And also Megan Robeson, uh, director of public services here. So uh director, uh go right ahead. Our first item on the agenda is the progress report on the collection of delinquent bills for DPU. Um good afternoon. Uh thank you, Councilman, for inviting me to the the committee to present. Um so since July of twenty twenty-five, we have had a little over twenty seven hundred people um enroll um in a uh payment plan to to pay past due bills. Um counting the people who were already enrolled, we are currently at four thousand eight hundred and some change plans of eight hundred and fifty so plans. Ninety percent of those plans that people are on, they are on track with payment, meaning they're not, you know, slipping on either their current bill or their past due bill. Um since May of twenty-five, and this is through the end of the year, my date is only good through the end of last year. Um we've collected ten point five seven million, and we still have six point two million that we expect to collect coming from the current payment plans. And in that collection, we had um just under twenty-seven hundred people who paid um one time for their their past due balance. That means they paid a hundred percent of what they owed. Correct. They paid in full, yes. And how many directors did you just say were pending where you expected to collect? Well, we still there there are still forty-eight hundred and fifty or so um active accounts, and we expect about six point two million to continue to come in from those specific accounts and collections. Um we have um done 142 work orders we sent out for turnoff. And as you know, this was commercial. Um we hit a lot of the very large balances last year that that we discussed at previous committees. Um of the 142, um 54 or 38 percent of those people um paid when we went to uh once they got the the notice for disconnection. Um seventy-nine people we actually performed disconnection on. Again, this is commercial businesses. And some of these admittedly, I don't think we're currently operable when we we disconnected. And thus probably why they were not paying. Um of those seventy-nine we disconnected, thirty-two got reconnected, so about 40 percent, and 47 are accounts that never paid and we closed those accounts. They didn't reach out or make payment. Um they're not getting um services now then. Correct, they're not getting services now. Um we have right now nine pending um disconnections. And that's uh that's out for work order um that we're we're doing again. Those are commercial industrial. And we are heading into uh uh very soon to be able to where we're gonna start going at higher end balances for residential. Um we have got um some discussions we have to have to finalize the program and then we'll be able to start doing those turnoffs. But um there's been a lot of hard work by you know my team and working with um you know Deputy Mayor Arnold to get us to where we can you know handle this program, we've got a good plan and you know people are gonna have plenty of opportunity to um get on a payment plan with us before we would would turn anyone off. So are the um are all of the uh ones where they were uh threatened with turnoff, are those all commercial accounts or those were all commercial at this point. We have sent notices um to the people who are residential that are in the dollar threshold and up, and they are aware that they are subject to disconnection, but they have not received a disconnection hanger.