By Vernon Robison
Moapa Valley Progress
Moapa Valley residents will see significant changes to the look of their water bills next month. The Moapa Valley Water District (MVWD ) is in the process of changing the format of its billing statements and the new bills will be sent out in mid-December.
The district will be discontinuing the current postcard-style bill in favor of a more standard full-page billing statement with an enclosed return envelope.
“There is really no one single reason that we are making this change,” said MVWD Water Production Superintendent Brian Mortensen. “Rather there are a whole handful of small, but important, reasons for it.”
The first of these reason is that local customers have asked for it, Mortensen said.
“The new format will allow us to put a lot more information on the bill that is helpful for the customer,” he said. “The postcard format worked years ago. But this will be more private and more customer friendly.”
Mortensen explained that the new bill will include more detailed information about the customer’s rate code. It will also show the customer’s 12 month water usage levels. And there will now be room for the district to post things like water saving tips, general customer service messages and information about district staff, Mortensen said.
The change in the billing also will have an improved accounting function for the district, Mortensen explained.
“One of the common problems to small utilities like ours is keeping our levels of lost and unaccounted for water contained and managed,” Mortensen said.
In the past this has been difficult because the district had divided up the community into four different meter reading periods each month, Mortensen said.
“That was needed back when we had to have staff go out to each property and manually read each meter,” Mortensen said. “But now, with radar meter reading systems, we can easily read the whole valley in one day. There is no need to do it four times in a month anymore.”
So starting in December all water meters in the district will be read around the first Wednesday of each month. All the billing statements will then be sent on the second or third Friday of the month and they will all be due two weeks later.
This consolidated schedule will make it easier for district staff to track lost or unaccounted for water, Mortensen said.
In addition, having just one billing cycle will cut down on the staff time needed to process all those monthly bills, he said.
“And the cost of making the change is really minimal,” Mortensen said. “It hardly shows up any difference in the budget. In the end, we’ll have a more customer friendly bill while saving our ratepayers money.”
