A programming glitch that caused nearly 2,100 delinquency notices to be mistakenly mailed to Rapid City water customers this week has been fixed, and the city will double-check every notice for the foreseeable future.

For more than a year, the city has tried to convert to a new software system after Hewlett-Packard stopped supporting the software the city had used for the previous 25 years.

The city hired Advanced Utility Systems of Toronto to provide the software, at a cost of $366,000. The city has paid about $291,000 of that amount and will ensure the system works before paying the balance.

Information from the old software system was loaded into the new software, and bills were sent out. In the process, 2,100 delinquency notices, separate from water bills, were sent to customers, giving people until May 1 to avoid shutoff.

As many as 500 calls poured into the water billing office Wednesday morning.

"It was a vendor issue," Mayor Alan Hanks said. "They missed one of the switches, and when the old data went into the new system, it didn't flag bills that had been paid, and the software read the accounts as being delinquent."

Hanks met with department directors and staff Thursday to develop a plan to prevent future problems.

"For the foreseeable future, we will manually verify every single delinquent notice we send out to make sure our software is working properly," Hanks said. "We're going to double-check all notices, and more importantly, prior to shutting anyone's water, off we will triple-check to make sure everything is proper."

The city will send a letter of explanation and an apology to all customers who received a delinquency notice this week. Hanks has also directed the water department to not shut off anyone's water for the next 30 days, regardless of whether a shutoff is warranted, which will allow the city time to verify that the system is operating properly.

"We're not going through this again," he said.

Contact Scott Aust at 394-8415 or scott.aust@rapidcityjournal.com