By LESLIE COLLINS
Northeast News
June 27, 2012

Kansas City’s Water Services Department is in need of an overhaul, and during the June 21 City Business Session, Bill Downey shared his insight.

Since January, Downey has worked as a program management consultant for the water department. Prior to working with the city, Downey worked for 40 years in the utility services industry and recently retired from his position as president of Kansas City Power & Light.

City officials asked him to review the department due to customer service complaints, along with a lack of timely completion of projects and projected water bill increases for Kansas Citians.

Downey said the goal is to improve the water department as a whole, rebuild credibility with the city and its citizens, identify barriers to reaching goals and create a roadmap for improvement.

One of the issues affecting Kansas City and cities across the U.S. is unfunded mandates in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Clean Water Act, which requires cities to upgrade sewer and storm water infrastructure as well as reduce sewer overflows, Downey said.

Upgrading Kansas City’s water system to EPA standards will cost approximately $4 billion, Downey told Northeast News.

Pair that with Kansas City’s aging water infrastructure and that means Kansas Citians will soon be paying more for their water.

The EPA’s solution for funding upgrades is to charge customers based on a percentage of the median adjusted gross income for each citizen, which would double, if not triple the current water bill, Downey said. Currently, the average monthly water bill for a customer in Kansas City is $70. That will likely double within the next five to seven years, he said.

“Rates are obviously a big issue,” he said. “It’s an issue across the country and on top of all our aging infrastructure needs, we have the overlay of this federal mandate which exacerbates the capital challenge.”

Other water department challenges include staffing issues and poor customer service, he said. One of the first things he noticed about the department was its significant shortage on “critical leadership and critical manpower.”

“It wasn’t just the leadership positions,” he said. “There were key vacancies in the call center, in craft jobs. We’re working very hard on that (filling positions).”

A number of jobs had someone in an “acting role,” which isn’t sufficient, he said.

Thirty percent of the call center seats were vacant and weren’t adequately staffed with managers, he said. Instead of resolving an issue with a customer during the first call, the issue was handed off, sometimes seven to eight different times, to other personnel, he said. Downey is working with the department to improve customer service and is proposing implementing a “virtual hold.” Virtual holds could prevent customers from waiting on the phone for long periods of time. With a virtual hold, a machine asks the customer if he or she would like the city to call him or her back instead of waiting on the line.

Other areas needing improvement include the department’s hiring process, coordination with other departments, like public works, and its culture, he said. The department is overly controlled by City Hall, which interferes with the mission of the business to serve customers, he said.

“I’m rather stunned at the number of times a very small job comes back down here (City Hall) for a signature,” Downey said. “There are processes there that are not helpful at all.”

To further improve the department, Downey has tasked the chief financial officer with creating an annual business plan, creating a score card for the business, and working with engineer personnel to develop a five-year capital plan.

Downey also provided suggestions for improving the department’s hiring process and said the department must be as transparent as possible with the public when it comes to spending money.

“You have a very old system and not much money has been put into it,” he said. “We haven’t been close to putting the capital in the ground we should have been putting in for decades.”

City council members thanked Downey for his honesty and Mayor Pro Tem Cindy Circo added that the city is working diligently to improve the water department.

“We saw it (problem), we recognize it and we’re doing something about it,” Circo said.