City cracking down on overdue bills

By Kevin Killough
Staff writer

GALLUP — The utility collections department is doing its part in an ongoing effort to cut costs. Last January, the Independent reported on the high rates of overdue balances on city utility accounts. City Clerk Alfred Abeita explained at the time that the department was having a hard time doing what needed to be done to collect on the accounts, largely because the office was at half its normal staff.

Four positions have since been filled, and other changes have been made, Abeita said. The positions filled are a field operator, customer service account specialist, and two employees that work as assistants and data entry clerks.
“That’s half our department,” Abeita said.

In addition, the staff has undergone more training with the software they use. This greatly increased the efficiency of the collections.

“We wanted to make sure our staff can utilize our software,” Deputy City Clerk Brenda Romera said.

The software is now keeping better track of the number of overdue notices sent and cut-off dates. In addition, the office was manually doing many steps in the process only to find out the software was capable of handling them.

Some of the largest past due accounts were businesses and government entities. Abeita says the department is putting more pressure on businesses to get caught up and working with the government accounts. In the case of government accounts, Abeita said it was mostly red tape. They’ve taken steps to allow for faster collections in those cases.

The new field operator, sometimes referred to as the “cut man,” has also been keeping busy dealing with past-due residential accounts. One of the other benefits that came out of the software training was that the company was familiar with the process used in other cities and mentioned that Gallup’s policies were unusually lenient.

“Some cities require 100 percent payment before they’ll return service,” Romero says.

The department has taken steps now to require customers to do more to pay on their past due accounts.

“We didn’t want to ask for 100 percent, because some people are having a tough time ... We will work with them, but now that it’s summer, we’re getting stricter,” Romero explained.

The city is also working with City Attorney Dave Pederson to file liens on past due accounts, especially those that owe the city a lot of money.

“What we’re mainly going after is large accounts,” Abeita said.

Abeita said that it’s too soon to be sure how much progress has been made to collect on the accounts. But he hopes to receive a balance report from the IT department soon. This will give him the first preliminary indications of how successful the efforts have been.