Alderman hopes city's plan for improved information technology will help bad water bill problem
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Chicago is the third largest city in the country, but ancient technology and a lack of data-sharing have made delivering services to the city's nearly 3 million residents wildly inefficient.
As CBS 2 Investigator Megan Hickey reported Friday, there is now a plan to fix the problem – which we have been exposing for years.
Through our "Getting Hosed" series on bad water bills, we have found that often communication issues between different city systems have often been the source of the headaches.
The figures involved with bad water bills can be staggering. As Hickey reported back in January, Chicago homeowner Reindalo Santiago fought for six months to get an inexplicable water bill for $30,137.38 corrected.
CBS 2 got involved, and eventually, Santiago got an apologetic call from a Water Dept. manager, saying the bill had been corrected to what he actually owed - $275.64.
There had been some still-unexplained communication problem. And a four-hour hearing in August showed the City Council it wasn't an isolated issue.
Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th) says much of the problem is out-of-date systems, and a lack of meaningful investment in information technology.
"A lot of them are antiquated - specifically the Water Department, where the banner program has been around for 20 years," Villegas said.
Two years ago, a consulting firm found that the city needed to revamp its software drastically and increase its investments in IT infrastructure.
After the administration of Mayor Lori Lightfoot was unreceptive to making that investment, the administration of Mayor Brandon Johnson is finally getting a solution off the ground.
"IT has not been really centralized," Villegas said.
Villegas says the brand-new Chicago Taskforce on Innovation and Technology - which should be in place by January - will help solve the confusion, angst, and financial hardship that has resulted.
What we want is to get one centralized department of IT - let that department be the clearinghouse for delivering and really, quite frankly, providing the IT solutions for the departments," Villegas said.
The $350 million investment will impact IT services across the city. But Villegas hopes that notably it will help stop the hemorrhaging of bungled bills from the city's water department.
It will take some time to see results from this new taskforce, but Villegas says in the meantime, they've started working with the city Comptroller's office directly to catch mistakes and correct some of these nonsensical water bills.