Good afternoon.

The regular meeting of the Finance Debt and Budget Oversight Committee will come to order, and the clerk will call the role.

Here.

Driscoll.

Gaddis here.

Hobbes.

Jones here.

Three present.

Thank you.

All right, good afternoon.

Uh Director Bannister, and we will start off with uh the uh delinquent collection report from DPU.

So good to have both of you here, Commissioner.

Great.

Thank you.

Uh good afternoon to all of you.

Um, my name is Batika Pope Bannister, and I'm the director of the Department of Public Utilities, and I'm here with Cindy Geronimo, who is the Commissioner of Utilities Administration.

In June, we reported three point eight million dollars collected year to date, and in July, we are reporting five point two million collected year to date for residential and commercial.

While collections through installment plans are significant, a large delinquent balance remains outstanding.

Disconnections and reconnections are also predominantly among residential accounts, highlighting ongoing challenges in payment compliance and service continuity.

Our various payment plan programs remain an important tool for reducing outstanding balances and helping customers avoid or recover from service interruption.

For our residential customers in July, we had 1,016 new plans.

So year to date, we have 4,148 plans.

And that gives us year-to-date amount collected, $5,14.

Total scheduled to be paid is $11,521,903.

For our commercial customers, we had seven new enrollment plans, which gives us year-to-date 31 plans.

And active plans through July or nine is 99.

Our year-to-date total is 221,448, with 325,382 scheduled to be paid.

As I mentioned, our totals for disconnection.

Our commercial were four.

So you'll see on the spreadsheet here are total active delinquent account delinquent amounts for residential 33,889.

Commercial is a little over 4 million.

And that would be totally owed.

Yes.

So it it looks like from uh I have last month's report that we've collected about a million dollars.

Yes.

Um in um in last month uh we had year-to-date enrollment of residential uh 6,502, 6,502 uh customers were enrolled, and then um for residential, but then this month we're reporting 4,148 enrolled.

So that that's a drop or yes, as um people finish up their previous um, they finish paying enrollments, yep.

Okay, or if they some we took off of a payment plan that they were on, and we were able to get them into um other plans that we have are fresh uh fresh starting.

Fresh start okay, all right.

And do you sense that the collection efforts, the actual dollars collected, are gonna drop off, or do you think um that it will continue to grow?

Uh we think we will in August are for the next report.

You will see that we continue to grow, and we do have a number of outreach events and some targeted uh customers that we need to reach out to.

Yeah, I think we have 13,000 that are available eligible to be on payment plans that we'd like to reach out to those folks and get them on a are we sending notices on the bill itself that you know passed due billing that they have the opportunity to get into a payment plan?

So yes, there were 18,000 originally identified that were eligible for the program that we are targeting with constant messaging, both through promise and through our uh comms office.

So we're also uh there's a notice on the bill, um, and we're having outreach sessions.

We did as of last Friday, we had 3800 customers signed up and um 1.6 million collected through last Friday.

So it has um it is popular.

We are continuing to outreach.

We just looked at the 13,000 that are still eligible that haven't participated yet.

We divided it into council districts so that we can do some outreach with the council um numbers and let them know, and we can do targeted outreach and messaging as we wind up the program at the end of September.

Okay, that's good.

Councilperson Gaddis.

Thank you.

Um yeah, you guys have been wonderful as I said before the meeting.

I wanted on record that you guys have been at block parties and different events hosting events throughout my committee or my district, and I even personally sent out a letter to uh about 2,000 people in our district just to let them know hey, it's out here, hey, we've got this program.

Um I think we need to buy a letter folder though, because I folded a lot of letters.

Um but I wanted to ask about promise pay.

I had a customer or a resident customer call yesterday, they were one month late or a couple days late of their bill, and they got a promise pay tax uh tax sent to them.

Is that do we just send that automatically the day someone is late on a payment, or do you wait a little bit of time?

Like how does that work?