T or C’s customers’ past-due utility bills skyrocket during pandemic, but collection problems date back earlier

by Diana Tittle | April 6, 2021
7 min read
Commissioners Frances Luna and Amanda Forrister expressed the opinion that the utility office's collection procedures are too lenient after looking at summaries of 15 representative past-due accounts that raise the question of how these and other significantly delinquent customers will ever catch up on their utility bills. Photograph by Diana Tittle

A staff report that the City of Truth or Consequences is carrying $700,000 in unpaid utility account fees prompted the city commissioners’ outrage and immediate action to reimpose red-tag procedures suspended during the pandemic.

At the commissioners’ second March meeting, acting City Manager Tracy Alvarez handed out summaries of 15 representative past-due accounts. She then asked the commissioners to approve the resumption in May of red-tagging, the practice of leaving notification of imminent disconnection on the doors of delinquent customers. Red-tagging normally takes place when a utility customer has not made a payment for two billing cycles and ignored a delinquency letter allowing the recipient five days to make payment arrangements. Once customers receive a red-tag warning, they have another five days in which to make payment arrangements.

The commissioners audibly gasped when Alvarez reported the $700,000 in delinquencies. Alvarez confirmed that around $200,000 in arrears had been racked up in one recent month alone. The latter figure approximates the $236,657.33 labelled as “Total Arrears” in the city’s January 2021 “Monthly Billing Report” for utility services.

Alvarez provided the commissioners with no documentation of how staff arrived at the cumulative total of $700,000 in past-due utility bills, although she did report that commercial customers accounted for 35 percent of the total.

Alvarez subsequently declined to answer the Sun’s question about how many of the city’s 4,100 utility customers were behind on paying their bills. She acknowledged only that the $700,000 in arrears came from “active delinquent accounts.”

Alvarez confirmed at the March 24 meeting that T or C’s fiscal 2021 budget “factors in our expectation that people will pay their bills.” The amount in arrears represents about 6 percent of the $11 million the city expects to collect in utility revenues this fiscal year.

Alvarez told the commissioners that she had been “a little shocked” when she recently asked the utility department to pull current revenue figures for inclusion in several grant proposals. “That’s when I noticed the drop in our revenues.” Later in the meeting, she reported that only 30 percent of this year’s budgeted utility revenues had been collected to date.

Yet, in its second-quarter financial report to the New Mexico Department of Finance and Administration, T or C reported that revenues realized for each of its utility services stood at 50 percent or higher of the amount budgeted as of Dec. 31.

Although incomplete, the 15 summaries of representative past-due accounts—which detail every bill, payment, penalty, penalty reversal and customer notification posted between March 2020 and March 2021—are the most reliable documentation of the city’s collection problems available. City staff chose these particular customers to “reflect accounts with high delinquencies and accounts that have not made regular or frequent payments,” Alvarez explained in response to a question from the Sun.

The commissioners’ ire increased as they flipped through the summaries, five of which were for commercial accounts whose past due balances ranged from $770 to $11,230 and 10 of which were for residential accounts whose past due balances ranged from $3,162 to $14,360.

“I think it is irresponsible, ridiculous, unacceptable that the residents of our community expect us to continue providing them with water, electricity and sewer without making a payment because, by god, we know they’ve been paying their cell phone bills,” Commissioner Frances Luna said. “I don’t want to wait till May. We hear about how we need to make these infrastructure improvements, but if our citizens are not paying their bills, we can’t do any of that.”

Luna then made a motion to reinstate red-tagging procedures “immediately.” Commissioner Amanda Forrister seconded it, having picked up a hopeful comment by Uility Office Manager Sonya Williams that delinquent customers might use some of their tax stimulus or tax refund monies to pay down their arrears.

“Why are we waiting until May?” Forrister commented. “These stimulus checks might be spent by then before they get their warning that their electricity is going to be turned off.”

The motion on the table prompted the most animated discussion of an issue by the commissioners in recent memory.

Mayor Sandra Whitehead weighed in first. “For months now we’ve had people who have been disgruntled, especially after we installed the AMIs [advanced metering infrastructure], and they complained about how they were receiving astronomical bills for seven, eight, nine thousand dollars,” Whitehead observed. “I have to say after Sonya [Williams] looked into the astronomical bills, she found that the people who were complaining and fussing and telling us that we were wrong, wrong, wrong, were actually delinquent and hadn’t paid in months. It’s not fair!”

Whitehead continued: “Also, some people got very small to no bills. Did they ever call to tell us. No! Cause that was in their favor.”

“In all fairness,” the mayor said in conclusion, “please, please help us. At least make a payment arrangement, at least pay something.”

Having studied the delinquent account with the highest amount in arrears, which belonged to a citizen who over the past year had paid only $500 toward a $14,000 balance despite the city’s having reversed $1,100 in late payment penalties, Commissioner Luna again expressed her outrage.

“We have to start taking them to court or whatever we can do legally, Jay,” she said to the city’s attorney, Jaime F. (Jay) Rubin. “You’re not just taking advantage of the City of T or C. You’re hurting your neighbors, the police department, the library, you’re hurting everybody.

“We have to be strict,” Commissioner Forrister agreed. “We aren’t asking them to pay for something they haven’t already used,” she said a few minutes later. She added: “People need to be more conscious of what they’re doing. If they can’t pay the bill, turn off the dang TV.”

“If someone skips out, we can put a lien on their property, right?” Commissioner Randall Aragon observed.

“That’s one option,” Attorney Rubin confirmed. Rubin advised the commissioners that municipal codes provided all the collection tools needed and that it would be best to pass a “simple motion saying that we will enforce all our existing ordinances in the collection of our utility bills.”

“That is my motion,” Commissioner Luna said. Commissioner Forrister seconded it, and the motion passed unanimously.

The commissioners placed the onus for the collection problem squarely on deadbeat citizens. A closer examination of the 15 representative accounts reveals that city’s collection problems predate the pandemic and suggests that T or C’s collection procedures may indeed need tightening.

In March 2021, after more than a year during which T or C had suspended red-tag notifications for compassionate reasons, the total arrears on those 15 accounts had mounted to $90,000. This past-due balance was up 50 percent from March 2020, when the total arrears on those 15 accounts stood $45,000. In other words, the city was experiencing a significant delinquency problem before COVID-19 hit.

In response to commissioners’ questions, staff described several collection procedures whose leniency may explain why, as Utility Office Manager Williams put it, “some of these accounts are to the point of how are they ever going to get caught up.” Policies that may contribute to the nonpayment problem include:

• the “45-to 50-day” window—according to Williams—that delinquent customers are given to make arrangements for payment before they are red-tagged.

• the lack of a significant payment—perhaps tied to a percentage of the utility customer’s total arrears—required to forestall disconnection. The residential utility customer with the notorious $14,000 delinquency was, for example, able to prevent his loss of utility services in October 2020 by making a payment of only $259.49.

• the ability of delinquent utility customers to make three successive plans for payment of arrears when they are unable to meet the first or second plans.

• the ability of landlords whose previous tenants have left behind unpaid utility bills to—as Alvarez explained at the March 24 commission meeting—“come in and certify that new tenants are coming in” in order to get a new utility account established.

T or C’s commissioners left decisions about whether these potential loopholes should be closed for another time. The following day, T or C posted this announcement on its public information page on Facebook: “Effective immediately, the City of Truth or Consequences Utility Office will begin the process of Red Tag and disconnects for nonpayment.”

author

Diana Tittle is editor of the Sun.

Share this:
HAVE YOU SEEN?

Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.


RELATED

RELATED
City Manager claims City is reducing utility dependence—unsupported by the numbers—while planning to take more money out of utility fees
by Kathleen Sloan | May 29, 2020

July 1 utility customers under Truth or Consequences’ jurisdiction will face a 40-to-50-percent hike in water fees, a 5-percent hike in sewer fees and a…


6 thoughts on “T or C’s customers’ past-due utility bills skyrocket during pandemic, but collection problems date back earlier”

  1. Peter A. Lawton

    I know—or thought I knew—the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission had implemented a moratorium on the cutting off of power for those unable to pay their electric bills. There’s a good chance many of these disreputable, cell phone-addicted reprobates are just broke because times have been tough the last year or so. According to the U.S. Census, about one third of T or C residents live at or under the poverty level.

  2. Poor choice of words in this article—“deadbeat” is pretty harsh. If this has been going on since before the pandemic, why stir up a crap storm now, why not before? This city manager that everyone praised, why didn’t he look into it? I’m sorry, but this whole article is horse crap. How do you rack up a $14,000 bill and still have electric, it’s very confusing. Time to change your policies, City of T or C.

  3. First, any business—and the electric company seems to be a business and not a service provider—needs to know how much comes in and how much goes out. It needs a proper recordkeeping system, in this case meter reading to determine who owes what. Our electric department has not been audited/manged professionally for years. The city has attempted to solve these problems by throwing more money at the problem (e.g., smart meters).

    Now that civil rights legislation ending “qualified immunity” has been passed (“New Mexico Governor Signs Historic Legislation to End Qualified Immunity”—Innocence Project), we might see our city commissioners take their jobs more seriously than to point fingers and call people “deadbeats.” Times are hard and we have seen nothing yet. . . .

    I hope that the new city manager will overhaul the system, closing the leaks for possible corruption, and create a system that recognizes that the citizens own the system and it needs to serve them—first and foremost—going into the “New Normal.”

    1. For the record, no city commissioner used the word “deadbeat” to describe city utility customers with significant and, in some cases, massive unpaid balances. Perhaps ill advisedly, I used the word to summarize and characterize several commissioners’ public condemnation of such customers as “irresponsible,” and “taking advantage.”

  4. So here I took a chance and made a comment. I see that you again censored my comment—it is not what I wrote and yet my name is on it. Censoring is censoring, whatever you “change,” “modify” or “enhance?—for whatever reason, etc. I included the URL for the article on the new law passed on “qualified immunity” so that folks could have the source. The Sentinel does not censor letters to the editor, so that what I write is what I wrote, and if it makes me look like a hero or a fool, that is on me.

    I do not understand how those with leftest/rightist leanings or any journalistic integrity can condone and or justify any form of censorship and violate the 1st Amendment to the Constitution.

    Thank you for your correction as to the word “deadbeat.”

  5. The Sun’s editorial standards policies are published on our website. Like most news publications, the Sun, as we clearly state, “will remove comments or portions of comments that we deem inappropriate for any reason without consent and notice. We also reserve the right to edit comments for brevity, clarity, spelling, punctuation, etc.”

    Mr. Noel’s comment was edited for clarity. The Sun will not abuse our readers by allowing our comments section to become a dump site for rants or carelessly written arguments. Those are the rules by which we strive to maintain civil discourse on our pages. If Mr. Noel does not care for these rules, he is free to eschew sharing his thoughts on our site.

    Furthermore, Mr. Noel’s link to the Innocence Project article about qualified immunity WAS included. Hover over the article’s headline in his comment, and it turns purple, indicating the presence of a clickable hyperlink.

Comments are closed.

Scroll to Top