By Audrey Posten

The city of Guttenberg has new accounting software, and staff are reminding customers who previously had auto pay for their utility bills to assure they have re-signed up for auto pay under the new system. 

“We had notices out to let people know that, with the new system, they had to re-sign up for auto pay. But we are finding a lot of people had not seen the notices. We switched the utility part in November, and we still have people that haven’t caught that they need to re-sign up,” said Guttenberg City Manager Jamie Blume.

Through the transition, Blume said the city has not had time to track which customers have or have not switched—and who hasn’t paid their bills. 

“We’re giving customers the benefit of the doubt because we have a lot of things that we’re trying to get corrected as well,” she said. “We just had a customer come in a couple weeks ago that was on auto pay and figured out, finally, that his bill kept getting bigger and bigger.” 

If customers have not re-signed up for auto pay since the city switched from postcard to paper bills, Blume said that is a sign they are inactive.

Customers should reach out to the city to re-activate auto pay, or go on the city website, cityofguttenbergia.gov, to sign up themselves. 

The city has not yet enacted delinquent notices or penalties. It’s been a learning curve for everyone, acknowledged Blume.

“We don’t want to penalize our customers when we’re struggling too. We feel their pain,” she said. “But we don’t want people to have like seven, eight months worth of bills and all of a sudden realize, ‘Oh my gosh, this is out of hand,’ and get in a bind. We don’t want them to all of a sudden have like a $1,000 bill.”

Utility bills from the city include electric, water, sewer and garbage as well as a flat rate for storm sewer. Those with Black Hills Energy natural gas, phone or internet have separate bills for those services.  

“But a good chunk of their utilities are all through us, so sometimes they can be pretty big bills,” Blume said.