Water Quality, Streets & Infrastructure Committee - Regular Meeting

My check, one, two.

We're going to get started promptly at 02:30, one minute. So if anyone can please get to your positions, please, so we can start promptly at 02:30. And then we will go ahead and get started. I remember it all too well. Okay.

The time is 02:30. I call the water quality committee for Tuesday, 06/17/2025 with the purpose of discussing delinquent water bills. Clerk, please call the roll.

Martinez. Present. Morris, here. Gaddis, Hurtman? Here. Comrades? Here. Vote present.

Fantastic. Okay. So, Director Stevens, I understand you have a presentation, and this will be, if I'm not mistaken, two core issues. Number one, collections as well as delinquencies and expectations of for turnoffs. And for that, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Doug Stevens, Director for Department of Public Utilities. Again, today here to talk about our non pay or our disconnection process. So, as you know, just general overview, you know, we haven't done turnoffs since 2021 prior to March I'm sorry, to March 2020. When COVID hit, we entered into the moratorium that the council passed.

And then after we lifted that, we were in the AMI project. Administratively, we had decided that, one, it wasn't wise of us to go after people for non pay when we're asking to get in the home so we can be able to effectively meter them and b, with the project, the resources that we had available to us to do a disconnection program were completely consumed by the AMI project and making sure that, that was successful. So we have not shut off for, at this point, a period of five years. We intend to start the disconnection process next Monday on June twenty three, which we'll end up starting with notifications. There'll be letters.

There'll be things going on to bills. So the notifications will start. Talking a little bit more about the letters here on the next sheet I gave you. And then after that, I would expect after certain letters go out, there'll be around two weeks or a little more before the shutoffs will actually start. And then people who have not either paid in full or got on a payment plan will end up with a hangar and disconnection.

So next page, kind of going through our process. So we have what's called the dunning process. And dunning is really just thresholds in our system that trigger actions. So at a certain threshold, you're going to get a late fee and a reminder notice. At a certain threshold, you would get a disconnection letter.

So you can see we kind of laid that out there. People will get those notices through their bill. But that disconnection letter that we see in the second little tab there, that will be sent to the people who are above the Dunning threshold. So we haven't set the exact threshold we're going to use yet. But for example, if we say everyone who owes us $1,000 or more is going to get a letter and they're going to start seeing things on their bills, we'll start turning people off who owe over $1,000 or more.

So we're working on setting exactly what the right level to turn Dunning back on to. And of course, as time goes on and we have more and more people get on payment plans, which is our hope, or we have disconnections, we'll ultimately reduce that level of our dunning system that activates the disconnection to lower and lower dollar amounts. But after we send this disconnection letter, so someone will get it and let's say they get this letter, they are told after ten days essentially, we can shut you off. This is the same process we did with the AMI turnoffs for people who wouldn't let us us in the home. If they don't respond to that ten day notice, at that point, we will schedule a shutoff, a disconnection work order in Cityworks, and we go out and actually put a five day door hanger on the property itself that will tell you that we're coming back in five days to disconnect if you don't get on a payment plan or pay in full.

So once that's done, our hope again is that most people are going to go on a payment plan. If they don't, they would get disconnected. After they get disconnected, they're going to need to, at that point, enter into a payment plan to get back on. And then we would turn them on as soon as we can verify the down payment and the reconnection fees that need to be paid and so forth. So it will probably be a twenty four- to forty eight hour turn on.

People will not be able to get same day service until we verify the payment files come in and that the deposit or the down payment on the installment plan has been received. We're going to try for twenty four, but we I think we'll be able to do that, but I don't want to guarantee that in all instances. So that's kind of the overview of the process we're going to do. Similar to what we did again during AMI. Then we're going to have a next sheet, if you go I want to kind of just talk about the delinquent accounts receivable.

So there's been a lot of talk around accounts receivable. So this is from one of our our documents

that Excuse we Director. Because it seems like this is a different portion of it. Is there any questions about I I I just want to make sure that we're hitting all the questions before we go through your entire presentation, because it seems like it's two separate issues, if you don't mind.

Sure.

Is there any questions about the, disconnect portion of it? Councilwoman Gattis.

Thank you.

I have a couple of concerns. Well, I understand why we're doing it. It worries me that we're doing it in the summertime when it's hot, And we don't really have any numbers. So I'm not quite sure how many residents in my district this will impact. Do you have numbers of residents by ZIP code that are going to be impacted at the day ranges you have listed here?

Not that we have pulled. Because we haven't set the dunning level yet for the exact threshold where we're going to start sending the notices, we don't have an exact count, but we did it and I didn't sort it by ZIP code. We did a quick check-in SAP a few weeks ago before the last hearing we had with the committee regarding the winter sewer average. And people who owed $75 or more or were roughly thirty or more days late, those people were about $11,200 $11,300 let's say, in the ballpark of that. But if you were to go to somebody who owed us $250 and we're sixty days late, it had dropped all the way down to about 3,600 people.

So a lot of times, as you know, people have paycheck to paycheck, and sometimes they're ten days late on their bill because they've decided what they're going to pay. So I wasn't overly alarmed by that early number of the 11,000. But the people who owe more than two months, that's where you really start to see people who are struggling. And we had as of residential customers anyway, it was in the 3,600 customer range for that. But we didn't sort that by ZIP code or even look at the account balances or anything of that nature.

Okay. I'm going to ask by way of referral that we get that information. Will the low income to nearly low income program also be put in those letters that are going out to our residents? Because if they're struggling, and we only at the last time we were told there's only 409 people enrolled and there's roughly, what, 60,000 eligible. That's quite a bit different. So will they be notified that they are eligible for this program?

We've already started with the senior. I saw one of our messages that we're going to be printing ran across my desk yesterday. And we can get the low income in as well. It will end up being on the bill as a kind of a bill note, but we can do that.

Okay. I appreciate that. Thank you, Chair.

Councilman Soranti. Thank you, Mr. Chair. So, director, when you're talking about collection efforts, are we are we, talking about commercial, industrial and residential? Yes. Okay. So everyone will be contacted because obviously we've got some large facilities where they have a very large bill, but they will be contacted in the same manner?

Correct, yes. Okay.

All right. Could you and you can answer this by referral. I'm just we're just curious what the payment options are once they go on a payment plan?

I got that a little bit later in the presentation. I'm kind of finishing up with payment plans, if we can Okay. Hold off on that

And then what happens if you if they go on a payment plan and suddenly they decide that they can't afford the payment plan so they stop paying? What happens to the water usage? Does it stop at that point again?

I've got that one in there too coming for Okay.

Very good. All right. You're ahead of me. All right, thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Congresswoman Morris.

Thank you. And this might be a little premature, but I'm going to ask it anyway. So I know that the dashboard on the app or online is a good tool. I personally have trouble getting onto it and you know there's so many passwords to remember and you know codes and everything else but when we can actually get on that dashboard or the website, is a payment option available to be able to do that online? Or do you have to talk to someone?

And I'll hit that too, but you're going to have to either talk to someone or there's a different portal to go to for that for payment plan.

Okay. And if I know that you do send out texts to individuals that say, hey, by the way, your payment is due or you're behind. Is there any way to respond to that or is it just a one-sided notice that just says, hey, your bill is due?

Those are one-sided. Kind of mass pushes. But we do internally, we send text to say, hey, your bill is due. And again, when we talk a little bit later about the options for the payment plans, the promise plans that we have been using since 2021, they do a lot of messaging. Hey, your installment account is coming up. You need to pay that. So they do some additional texting that we don't necessarily have capability

Because I know some of the other utilities, like a lot of times with my cell phone or something, it'll say, do you want to pay your entire bill, hit number one. So there may be other opportunities to make that easier.

We have a variety of options under which they can pay electronically, we do.

Okay, all right. And like I said, this might be a little premature. I know we're talking about disconnects, but I'll eagerly wait to hear your information. Thank you. Okay.

Continue.

So a lot of focus has been placed on delinquent accounts receivable. So the next two pages in your packet, I showed a breakdown one of the pages we use to do our monthly report on finances. And so our monthly statements usually include our accounts receivable. And you can see, starting with water, we're owed $23,000,000 Through the city's policy on collectible debt, it breaks down to where we're only anticipating being able to collect 65% of that, the lower 15,100,000.0 Sewer, the same way, you can see that it's only anticipated that we're going to collect about $11,000,000 of that. You can see the $27 the 38,000,000 minus the $27,000,000 So we're only going to collect about $11,000,000 so per our debt policy.

So one of the things that I just wanted to point out was these numbers get thrown out. But when you're talking debts that are over a year old or debts that are five years plus, they become incrementally harder to collect and you're less likely to collect. And again, some of that all this comes from the City of Toledo debt policy that was issued that was actually not a DPU policy, but it's a citywide policy that was put in place years ago. So we follow that. And that kind of gets into some of the timing I wanted to talk about.

So you won't see if you're going to collect let's say, you are going to collect a full $11,000,000 of sewer debt. You're not going to see it for three to four years unless all of a sudden everybody gets on a payment plan and completes it. It would with the number of customers we have to either turn off or get on payment plans, we're not going to be able to turn them all off or get them on payment plans in a year. With thousands of shutoffs to do, even at 100 shutoffs a week or a couple of 100 people a week getting on payment plans, it's going to take well over a year to work our way down. It just it's going to take time.

And we're going to push it the highest rate we possibly can. But once people are on payment plans, which we'll talk about later, it's going to take up eighteen months after they get on one if they complete it to see that money. So we're really talking three, four years out before you'll collect it, assuming we can collect it. And I think that was the point I wanted to make with this, is there are large balances out there, but collectability and our ability to get people to comply, enter into payment plans and so forth is still limited. A turnoff doesn't really generate any revenue.

It's not something we want to do. It stops additional water loss. It stops additional revenue loss. But it doesn't really recover revenue unless people are willing and able to pay on those plans. So that was really the focus I wanted to put on the delinquent accounts receivable.

I have just one quick question regarding that. You does the city negotiate a lower settlement option?

No, we do not.

Okay, great. Thank you.

So moving to the next page. Just kind of a little breakdown on what our payment plans are going to look like. We've worked through them a little bit. What we have come up with is for a residential customer, we're looking for 5% down. The maximum term of length that we're going to use is eighteen months to repay the debt.

So we're looking for a minimum of $50 down or 5%. So anybody who owes over $1,000 they would have to pay 5%. Anybody under $1,000 it would be $50 down payment. Kind of the way this sort of came about is we're trying to get people to enter in at a reasonable dollar figure to get into a plan, but the 5% really figures in because over eighteen months, if you've already put 5% down, your monthly payment will be 5.27% of the balance. So if someone can't really afford the 5% down, they're never going to be able to make the 5.25% payment every month for eighteen months.

So we that part of that selection was to be able to say, hey, we don't want to have this huge amount upfront that a customer struggles to pay, and we something that we know they can afford and that the payment plan can be resembling that affordability. If someone were to be disconnected and have to be reconnected, we do collect $75 deposit that they can get back after they have demonstrated that they're going to be current and they've paid their bills. That's been in place in DPU for many years. Nothing has changed there. Commercial and industrial or, let's say, large commercial apartment complexes, those are going to end up with a 25 percent down payment.

We expect that a business, if they want to continue to operate, would be able to come up with a way to give us a quarter of that down and repay us within twelve months. We're essentially extending 0% financing for people. So we think that those terms are fair. So again, on either of these, we would encourage people, if you can pay it all at once, please do. If you can't, enter into a plan.

If you can put more down to make your monthly payment easier, we recommend they do. And we'll have some flexibility in our call center for people to be able to choose that. But this is kind of the bare minimum and the maximum length that we would want for our customers to repay. If a payment is missed and you go past due, you could be potentially subject to disconnect. For the moment, we're going to allow people back on to a payment plan if they miss.

But when you are above the thresholds we talked about earlier, there'll be some people below the threshold. Maybe you owe $500 and we're not getting to you yet. But somebody who owes $1,000 or more, we're in your level of, I guess, debt owed, you would be subject to termination. If you've gotten the disconnection letter from us and gotten on a payment plan, you could be subject to termination. So there's going be a little bit of grace on that for a while as we work our way and reduce the number of people who are not in payment plans or have paid in full.

But just want people to be aware that you can't get on the plan and then just simply default. There could be consequences of turnoff for that. Again, we're wanting to put people into plans they can afford.

Councilmember Gattis.

Thanks. I just had a couple of follow-up questions. Since this is rolling out Monday, did you work with MarCom's on a media push to let our residents know this information? Or are you relying solely on the billing letter?

Well, we're to put something out through comms. Comm is aware that we're planning to do this, and we've talked about making sure we put something out. We were waiting for this hearing and then we'll get with comms to put the message out. But again, hopefully, all of you can spread the word to constituents that, hey, get on a payment plan. The earlier, the better.

Yeah. No, and I agree and I will definitely do my part. I'm just worried. I know that I'm anticipating a large flux of complaints and people in a state of panic. Are we ready? Are you prepared with more staffing to take complaints? Is ENGAGE going to have to staff more like I guess I don't have the numbers, so I don't know how much to expect.

I think there'll be a blitz at first. I know that Commissioner Jacobway is preparing for that. She's been having training for all of her agents, for her customer service agents to be able to be ready. So I think we're rolling into that. We've dedicated a percentage of our meter shop workforce to be able to go out and do the turnoffs.

They still have other duties to go out and make sure that transmitters are working right and new appointments and things. So they still have other duties to do. But yes, we're dedicating the full resources that we have to do this. And we did when we did these shutoffs during AMI, there were some at times where some spikes in call volumes happened. But I think based on that, we're pretty well prepared to handle it. And I'm sure call times will be a little bit slower than normal, but we're ready.

Okay. And then will this impact the AMI meters that are left that the employees are working on?

It could. I mean right now, we're still kind of considering them separate issues. So we have always been doing turnoffs for noncompliance, even the last several years. Like if someone has a water leak that's flooding up through the yard, we tell them, we're going to turn you off and you have to comply to get this fixed to get water back on. And so there's so like AMI noncompliance will kind of be its own thing.

If they overlap, we'll cross that bridge with them. So I do expect at some point there will be overlap. But with the small number, I know it sounds like a large number with about 5,800 of them left, but the small number left, I think that they'll stay mostly separate issues.

Okay. And then do you know I mean, I know do you know if ENGAGE will also have the knowledge to enroll people into the low income, nearly low income program as well or to encourage them? Will they have that?

I believe they do. I have Commissioner Jakeway is in the back. She could probably come up and answer that question Wonderful. More

didn't see you back there. I just want to make sure we're reaching as many customers as possible and making this as gentle as possible.

Yes. Thank you. That's a great question. And so as Director Stevens mentioned, we've been focusing on training all of the customer service agents, whether their primary call queue that they respond to is public utilities or Engage Toledo, on how to enter a customer into an installment plan. As you heard, the guidelines are new, but a lot of the parameters have stayed the same.

We've had a lot of new staff join our team lately, so this will be new for everybody. But the training, we're there. We're ready. With regard to Engage Toledo after business hours, which I believe is your question, so during business hours, our customer will call 245-1800, which is the public utilities number. However, if a customer calls Engage Toledo after business hours or a weekend, we will have the same training, the same knowledge to be able to answer customer questions.

As Director Stevens mentioned, we're working with Director Hart and the communication team on a new landing page on our city website because that's a great source for referral. Residents always feel confident when they can go and read the same information that you're telling them on the phone. And then ultimately, the goal is that every agent, no matter if you're in engaged Toledo or DPU, you will be trained to honor somebody on an installment plan. We're not starting there today, but that is the goal for us to be long term.

All right. Thank you so very much. Thank you. Thank you, Chair.

And then just to follow-up that on, Director Stevens, so since you have access to the individual and you know that they could qualify for one of our many discount programs, is it possible to retro their water bill so it's not as high since they did qualify for their, I guess, discount?

It's something that we can do. We haven't discussed the policy on that at the moment, but that is something we can do. If someone has been qualified for low income discount for a year and they didn't take that discount, we can look at going back and being able to do something. The low income might be a little more difficult because low income can vary. You could qualify it sometimes and maybe not at others, But that's definitely something that we'd be willing to take a look at and have capabilities to do.

Fantastic. Councilman Sarantu.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So I want to follow-up on that. Are there what are the requirements to qualify for low income? Do they have to send in a copy of tax return or what? So we've set up a portal with Neighborly, who's going to

do some vetting for us. But they will have to provide some income documents. They're going to have to qualify at 200% of the poverty level or under. So there are requirements. They'll have to send a few things in and get vetted. We have put people on at this point when they've called in and said I'm low income, but those are being verified. There is a verification process.

Okay. All right. I mean, because that would be good to help them out. I mean, you can go back a year or two, as long as they have proof, I think we should try to accommodate that in order to, again, get the payment in place. As far as the billing notices, obviously people are getting billing notices.

So I would hope that we would have inserts not just for the senior discount, but for the low income two programs that you have. Because again, some people do not have access to the Internet, and I think we need to make sure that we've covered all of our bases. It's nice to have it on the website. It's nice to have it available on an electronic format, but many people still rely on those inserts. And I think they'll notice that insert with it. So can you assure us you're going

have inserts? We can look at the insert. We have not done the insert yet. We've only done the bill messaging, so on the bill itself. But we can look at probably a onetime insert.

Inserts, we do. We can do those. We just have to be cautious about how many we do.

All right. So because I'm finding a lot of seniors do not understand that there's a 25% discount no matter what your income level is. Many of the complaints I've gotten on the winter averaging, they didn't know about it, about senior discounts. So they're happy to hear that. But if we can do that and then is there a way that on the bill it can be printed in subsequent months that there is low income available or senior discount and just call this number for more details?

Well, and that's what we're implementing now is that on the bill that you can qualify for low income. And I don't remember exactly what the message was, but we were putting the message for the senior discount on there. And I can't remember if we'd started to put low income on there. We may not have. I know we've done senior, but we can look into the low income.

Okay. And then another issue is my understanding is there's tenants, let's say, an apartment building that are billed for water and they haven't paid. Is the landlord responsible for Ultimately, down

if a so if a tenant doesn't pay, the landlord is ultimately responsible. And that is something we are going to look at for when a commercial facility if you've got 25, 30 units sitting in an apartment building and the residents are paying and the owner doesn't, we're going to have to look at how we handle those. Those are probably going to become legal cases. We may turn off, but that's a difficult decision to make. I mean those are going to be the hardest locations for us to determine what our final process will be because they can owe a significant amount of money and there's a lot of residents who've paid that bill.

Those residents are able if you're a landlord and you're in a multiunit apartment complex, they are able to set up an escrow account that their rent would go into ongoing and that wouldn't be touchable by the owner. It wouldn't necessarily come directly to us, but the owner would stop collecting revenue. But residents have to come together and do that. City can't do that for them. So but that is something that we're hoping that if larger apartment complexes are unwilling to get on payment plans or cooperate that there will be some resident involvement to maybe help get those set up and that puts pressure on those owners to actually pay those bills.

Okay. And then you and I recently had a conversation about putting a lien on properties, whether it's commercial or industrial or residential. And I took the liberty of calling the county auditor's office, and I spoke to the chief of staff. And he said that liens are permissible. However, the county auditor has certain standards that must be met, legal requirements.

So I've asked the county auditor's office to contact me hopefully sometime next week. They'll be in touch with me as to the procedure, and I will forward that to you because, again, I think that this is another avenue of collecting, putting a lien on property when it's sold, then we get our money. So I will get that to you, but I just wanted to convey that to you that the county auditor's office understands the situation, and I made it very plain that, you know, we're owed over $54,000,000, and we're just trying to collect some of this as best we can. And I know it's difficult from what you've told me, but, again, I think, we need to implement, placing liens on on property. And I think doing that and talking about that and communicating with the citizens of Toledo, especially the 95 and a half percent of the ratepayers that are paying their bill, that that could lead to additional revenue that maybe we didn't think we could get.

So I'll let you know.

Okay. Thank you. And we definitely intend on leaning when appropriate. So we that is that's kind of after this process fails and someone's been disconnected and their account has been completely turned off. So again, thank you. That is something in our toolbox we'll be utilizing.

Well, I really appreciate your efforts and what you presented today because, again, it shows that we want to move ahead, and we don't have a lot of excuses. We're just going to go ahead and collect what we can collect. So I appreciate that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just a quick follow-up question. Do you have community partners that you're working to help streamline some of the verification?

That's through the Neighborly portal. So we use Neighborly at the city for a variety of different functions. I think they use them in Director Clemens' department. And so we are going to be using them to assist and help let people know what they need once they start to apply for the low income. So we do have an organization dedicated to helping that. And if they do call us, we have our own outreach coordinator that can assist as well. Perfect. Vice Chair Morris.

Thank you, Chair. When you had briefed us about the different programs for the low income seniors, for seniors, and then for low income individuals that are roughly 200% of poverty, one of the things that I was really struck by is that that was seemed like a very low number of individuals who were taking advantage of that. Now it's just my perception. Do we have any community partners as Chair Martinez had mentioned, like the Area Office on Aging? Are we working with maybe our community centers and maybe the libraries to kind of get the word about these programs?

So we are. I'd ask that Commissioner Cindy Geronimo come up. She's been heavily involved with that and her staff and outreach. She can provide significant detail on what we've been up to.

Good afternoon. How are you today? So in answer to your question with community partners, we do work with number of community partners. Actually, how we started when we started WRAP, we were in conversations with the Financial Opportunities Center because that's been one of our great partners because they do a lot of education on budgeting and I think that's really important to help people stay on track, not only with just our bill but overall so they stay in their homes. I think that what was the second part of your question?

If we were working with the Area Office on Aging and community centers, libraries?

So we do have a partnership with the Area Office of Aging. So we enter into this partnership with them every year where we support their events and we have a presence at their events. And we also kicked off this year a senior campaign because of the fact that we knew that we were throwing a lot of technology at people. So we wanted to make sure that we kind of worked with the seniors directly. And at the end of the day, if they don't want to use the technology, there's a nice clean bill that's easy to understand.

We've talked about, with the late fee, maybe extending out the grace period so that there was some concern. I've spent a lot of time in the walk ins since we're getting ready to close that to hear concerns of what people have when that is completely shut down. And it's really I think if they're using the post office, they're still concerned about, it says Chicago, but that is a lockbox situation. That's not something I mean, the turnaround time for that is about forty eight hours, but we just want to make sure that people understand that if you're putting it in the post office, if you're just mailing it in a regular post office, that we're going to work with you to make sure you don't get a late fee. We also I think it's been a good response on all the different payment options that people have, but we do have to make sure that we have a presence out in the community.

Our outreach person does a great job of leveraging the library network, making sure she goes to senior centers, to the community centers, so I think we have a lot of really good partnerships.

Well, know the district and I'm sure probably the at large members attend many community meetings. I run a couple of them, so it would, you know, if you have documents or anything that we could hand out to individuals, I think it would be helpful, so you know, rather than just say here's a website that you can go to, if you have something in hand that could be given to individuals, I'm sure that would be another good way to get the word out.

Absolutely. As Council Member Sorantu had mentioned, we do a lot of inserts, so we do have an insert on the wrap and the senior discount. We'll continue to run those regularly and leverage the bill messaging on the bill itself.

So maybe if you can get us some Yes, we'll make

sure we have that for you. Yes, absolutely.

And you do have bilingual materials as

Yes, yes.

Thank you very much. You're welcome.

You asked my next question, thank you. Councilman Sarantu?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I had a follow-up question for Commissioner Geronimo. Am I am I correct that if somebody wants to pay online with their debit card, that there still is a fee?

There is. It's $2.25. Up to $400 if they pay online. But we've opened up a lot of other opportunities like the kiosk. If you pay by check or cash, it's free.

That I understand. I I I'm getting complaints from some people that debit cards typically they don't charge a fee when you pay on a debit card. Capital One, I know for a fact, Discover and so forth, there's not a fee. So I'm just wondering what is the reasoning why we're charging them a fee if they're using a debit card and we know that we're going to get that money right away?

It is this is we contract with a third party vendor. I mean that's something we can look at in the future if we go with another vendor. But that is set on their end to make sure that we leverage them to be API compliant. It's Then

I would ask you to consult with that vendor and see what we can do about it, maybe having a reduced fee maybe no fee.

And we did it used to be $3.95 and we were able to negotiate down to 2 So 20 we have used every opportunity to see if we could, you know, bring that down and we have like pushed the free options, which is, you know, writing a check or using ACH through your bank. We continue to just kind of push those processes that are free.

We have two kiosks that will be available?

We have two. So we have one over here right outside of the Ohio Building and then the other one's at Scott Park. Scott Park.

Where is that in relation to the police Building at Scott Park?

It's inside the lobby.

It's inside their lobby.

Yes. And that one can be moved. That's our indoor one that we could relocate to another location. Once we look at like, you know, what the traffic is, we could decide, oh, you know, we should move it someplace else.

All right. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you, Mr.

Chairman. I wanted to add just to that, that at the time that we took payment to San as our third party vendor, Commissioner Geronimo and Director Bennett worked really hard to get that three ninety five million down. That was they brought the hammers out and worked to get that. So I want to give them some credit there for going in and pushing on Paymentus to give us a better rate.

Okay. So that completes the presentation, correct?

Well, have one page left. Just want to go back and maybe give a couple of statistics. I just want to say, so you can enter into an installment plan. There's three ways you can go about it. You can call DPU customer service to enter into a plan, 245-1800. You can go to toledo.promisepay.com, you can find that on our website. Or you can call Promise at (419) 314-3402. You'll have to have an account number for Promise. If you don't know that, you could always call the call center and either get it from them and call Promise or just do everything through the call center. So you can call Promise from eight a.

M. To 05:30 Monday through Friday, and the call center is seven to 05:30 Monday through Friday. And so there's also other options that if someone else get if you get past due on a couple more on a balance as you're already in the payment plan, we have the option for a roll in onetime to extend the plan by three months if you roll in some additional debt. So there are options. We're doing everything we can to give people the opportunity to be successful on the payment plan and not go into a turn off status. That would be our ultimate goal. Thank you.

Great. Thank you so much. I appreciate you putting this together in such a quick manner, and I appreciate Councilman Serranto bringing this to our attention after the last hearing. I'm going to open this up to public comments specifically to discuss delinquent water bills. If there's anyone in the public that would like to speak, now would be the opportunity.

Going once, going twice. Okay. That being said, meeting adjourned. Thank you.