A year after changing the way it deals with bills when water meters can't be read, the Sewerage & Water Board is going back to estimating bills based on a customer's past water usage.

It's an effort to avoid big swings in the amount a customer is charged from month to month.

S&WB officials told the public utility's board of directors Wednesday that they were abandoning the flat-rate system instituted after an earlier algorithm-based estimating system was blamed for significant overcharges to numerous customers.

The change is intended to bring estimated bills more in line with what customers will likely end up having to pay when the meter is actually read and the invoices are settled up, said Tiffany Julien, who heads the S&WB's billing division.

The flat-rate system in place for the past year, she said, "can result in sticker shock" when the meter is read and customers are billed for their actual past usage.

Starting Monday, most customers will instead be sent bills that are based on the amount of water they used in the previous four months.

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The change to its billing policies comes as the S&WB is still trying to move past widespread overcharges that left many New Orleans residents enraged, sparked angry hearings in New Orleans City Council chambers and added to broader criticisms of the S&WB's management amid financial woes and street flooding.

The billing problems, which began in 2017, were blamed by the S&WB on employees who were not properly trained on the utility's latest billing software. Estimated bills sometimes reached into the thousands of dollars.

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S&WB spokesman Rich Rainey said that compared to the complicated formulas used by that software, the new system is a simpler and more traditional way of coming up with estimated bills.

Executive Director Ghassan Korban said he expects the change to improve on the old system.

"We're confident this will result in better outcomes for our customers," Korban told board members.

Estimated bills come into play whenever a meter reader can't check a customer's actual usage, which occurs fairly regularly but varies significantly from month to month. In June, about 7 percent of all customers received an estimated bill. In July, the number was closer to 30 percent.

There can be several reasons estimates are used: too few meter readers to check all of the 136,000 customers in the city, bad weather that prevents them from going out or other problems, such as meters that cannot be read because they are damaged or blocked.

Those estimated bills currently assume customers use 100 gallons of water a day. That policy was put in place a year ago, as many customers were hit with massive overcharges that were blamed in part on faulty estimates produced by billing software the S&WB started using in 2016.

But that number is far below what customers actually use, Julien said. The average residential customer actually uses about 171 gallons of water a day and the average commercial customer more than 1,500 gallons a day, she said.

As a result, when the meter is finally read, customers can receive bills that are significantly higher than they were expecting in order to make up for the undercharges on previous bills, she said.

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Under the new policy, the S&WB will estimate bills based on the average daily usage for the prior four months. At least two of those bills will have to be actual meter readings and not estimates.

If there aren't four months of bills to go on, or if more than two of them were estimates, the S&WB will default to an assumption of 170 gallons a day, according to a press release.

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With many customers still contesting their bills — about 1,600 new disputes were launched in August — Julien said that any bills that are more than twice what a customer typically pays would be excluded when the averages are calculated.