Richmond officials own failures in DPU billing rollout
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Richmond City Hall. Photo: Karri Peifer/Axios
Richmond officials are taking responsibility for the flawed rollout of the city's new DPU utility billing system and are promising to do better.
Why it matters: Problems with the rollout led to payment-posting delays, higher-than-expected bills, some customers not receiving bills at all, and hours-long waits for help.
State of play: Top city officials — including Mayor Danny Avula, chief administrative officer Odie Donald and DPU director Scott Morris — said Monday that they relied too heavily on the billing software vendors before launching the system in late May.
- The city conducted two pre-launch test runs, and its vendors signed off on the system being ready, Morris said.
- But Richmond relied too heavily on those assurances. Morris said that the city's own due diligence "fell short" and that more rigorous oversight could have caught some problems before the launch.
But it didn't. Problems involving bill formatting, a vendor requirement that every customer receive a new account number, and an unexpected server migration that delayed payments triggered a flood of customer confusion — and a surge in calls DPU wasn't initially equipped to handle.
Stunning stat: DPU's call center received an average of about 14,400 calls a month from January through May.
- In June and July, after the May 26 rollout, calls jumped to nearly 40,000 a month.
The latest: Officials say most of the issues have been resolved, but customers may still see lingering problems as DPU works through delayed payments, billing-cycle overlaps, and unresolved account disputes.
- The city has more than doubled DPU call center staffing, and call volume has fallen off from its June and July peaks (DPU averaged just over 22,000 calls in August).
- Still, officials could not say how many rollout-related customer cases remain unresolved.
- The vendors — Oracle and KUBRA — did not respond to Axios' request for comment by press time.
What they're saying: "When we miss the mark on something … we are going to own it and we're going to fix it," Avula said.
What we're watching: Officials said Monday that they're shifting DPU from being reactive to being proactive and that, starting now, locals should expect better communication, faster escalation of billing problems, and more customer-service capacity.