By Kathy Plum and Jeniffer Graham
Kingwood@DominionPost.com
KINGWOOD — Kingwood’s sewer board, like many of the businesses it serves, will take a hit because of COVID-19 closures.
“Because of COVID — restaurants being closed, schools being closed, Camp Dawson not doing any activities, I expected that to go down,” Sewer Board Clerk Amy DeBerry said.
She looked at records going back to 2016, “From 2018 to now the revenue’s going to be down,” about $40,000 per year — $80,000 total — in billed usage over the last fiscal year and the current one, she explained.
Billing error
Added to the losses brought on by COVID-19 is an $11,000 bookkeeping error caused by a software switch.
Kingwood sewer customers pay $20.95 per 1,000 gallons for the first 2,400 gallons used, $18.34 per 1,000 gallons for the next 7,600 gallons, $7 per 1,000 gallons for the next 490,000 gallons and $5.09 per 1,000 gallons for anything above that.
“We have some customers that use over a million gallons a month,” DeBerry said.
In July 2019, when a new billing system was installed, “the rate code was incorrect for sewer,” DeBerry said. “So no customers who used over 50,000 gallons were billed a lesser rate than what they should have been billed.”
No one caught the error until May this year, when DeBerry noticed the differences between amounts billed and collected in the 2019-20 fiscal year and prior fiscal years.
She was able to identify four customers that were affected — Preston Memorial, Stonerise Health Care, Richview Limited Partnership and West Virginia Army National Guard.
The total error was $11,000. “And we billed those customers half of it and sent them a letter and asked them to pay it. They didn’t have to, but they did,” DeBerry said.
The software error has been corrected, she said.
Kingwood Mayor Jean Guillot, who chairs the sewer board, said the losses are manageable.
“I think we can weather it because we’re being financially responsible and because we’ve got a good grasp on our financials with our new system,” Guillot said.
TWEET@DominionPostWV
