Bills anger rental managers PG&E awash in complaints about mistakes and delays. By Andrew LePage -- Bee Staff Writer Published 2:15 a.m. PST Thursday, March 18, 2004 Gary Haugstad, an executive with a Sacramento apartment management firm, fumed at yet another inexplicable gas bill. The $533 bill from Pacific Gas and Electric was for 11 units at a Rancho Cordova apartment complex managed by Haugstad's employer, FPI Management Inc. Three units were billed for gas used over a 10-month period - gas that should have been paid monthly by tenants - and one unit was billed for a five-day period in December 2002. "This is ridiculous. Here we are 15 months later ... and they're trying to collect on all of these little bills, and they've put them onto our master account," Haugstad said. "I've got one apartment where they're billing me for 10 months - almost the whole time the tenant lived there - and we don't know if that tenant paid the bills or not. We never got a bill, so our assumption was the gas was turned on in the tenant's name." Frustrated apartment managers throughout Northern California are trying to untangle a complicated web of PG&E billing changes, delays and mistakes that have surfaced in recent months. The problems are varied and include delayed gas and electric bills amounting to hundreds or thousands of dollars, double-billing of the tenant and owner and consolidating the billing for multiple properties under multiple ownerships into a single bill that can be hundreds of pages long. Although it's impossible to know how many rental properties were affected altogether, the utility reports having checked into more than 20,000 complaints of delayed bills and more than 16,000 complaints about double billing for rental properties in its service area, which stretches from Bakersfield to just south of the Oregon border. PG&E acknowledges that a new billing format for rental properties, coinciding with the launch of its new computer billing system in late 2002, has proven inappropriate for many apartment managers and has caused an "unintended disservice to the industry," said PG&E spokeswoman Christy Dennis. She said other problems, such as double billing and incorrect bill amounts, also have been discovered. Until complaints from rental businesses began stacking up last summer, she said, "we didn't realize all of the angst we had caused this particular industry." "It has been very cumbersome," Dennis said. "We've been working to resolve this since last July and for this particular industry every month that goes by adds that much more anger." PG&E reports that 28 percent of complaints it received from all customers last year were billing problems, up from 21 percent in 2002. The rental industry has been particularly hard-hit by mistakes from PG&E's new computer system, which also has caused problems for other commercial users and households. The utility, which is trying to emerge from bankruptcy protection, reports that problems with multi-month billing - in which a bill wasn't sent out for at least two months - peaked at 57,000 in July. Just over one-third of those multi-month bills were sent to landlords and property managers. Dennis said instances of double billing peaked at 16,000 cases in August, and PG&E now estimates there are about 530 cases left to resolve. The utility reads and bills nearly 9 million gas and electricity meters monthly. In many cases, Dennis said, an apartment owner was billed for a tenant's utility use because a PG&E customer service representative was still learning the more complex computer system and inadvertently failed to release the owner as the customer of record once the tenant put the service in his name. In other cases, a PG&E representative entered the tenant's address incorrectly and the bill defaulted back to the landlord. PG&E said that about 99.6 percent of its bills were correct before switching to the new computer system in late 2002. Last year, PG&E reports, 98.9 percent of its bills were correct, despite problems with the new computer system. The utility, which serves 532,930 customers in the capital region, said that it has greatly reduced the number of the most difficult billing problems experienced by the rental industry. In such cases PG&E issues customers a "help ticket" while special troubleshooters correct the problem or justify the bill. In October, 1,533 help tickets were outstanding among rental industry customers out of a total 31,886 outstanding among all customers. This week PG&E says the number of outstanding help tickets for the rental industry stands at 334, versus 7,800 among all customers. PG&E's regulator, the California Public Utilities Commission, reports there was an upswing in PG&E billing complaints from residential customers last year but that they're tapering off this year. Karen Dowd, manager of the CPUC consumer affairs branch, said the chief complaint was back-billing, but she said she could not quantify the precise number of such complaints. "It's the right amount, it's just that when people get it all at once they're a little shaken and they say, 'How am I going to pay all of this?' " Dowd said. By law PG&E must allow customers to spread payments on back-billed amounts over the same period for which a bill wasn't received, Dowd said. If someone receives a $100 bill for the previous five months of use then - assuming it's the customer's first bill - the customer has five months to pay that amount back. Ongoing monthly bills also must be paid. As with individual residential PG&E customers, one of the leading complaints from apartment managers is receiving bills for apartment units that hadn't been billed for up to a year, meaning a bill for hundreds or thousands of dollars is suddenly due. Tenants, some of whom might have moved, are typically responsible for paying the bill. "We are not collection agencies, yet these problems have put owners and managers in the unfortunate position by PG&E to collect on (tenants') past due bills," said Cory Koehler, deputy director of the Rental Housing Association of Sacramento Valley. "Potentially this could have a negative impact on the owner-tenant relationship since tenants in most cases are responsible for the utilities." The local Rental Housing Association, which is polling its membership to assess the extent of PG&E billing problems, and a sister association in the Bay Area plan to meet with PG&E officials. "The PG&E representatives I've talked to about this are very frustrated, and they want to fix the problem for us sooner rather than later, and they're committed to working with us to do that," said Bob Hines, chief executive of the Tri-County Apartment Association in San Jose. He added that he only wishes problems were addressed faster. Dennis said PG&E has recognized that landlords and property managers, like other large commercial customers, need to have access to account services representatives who specialize in business customers. Today, apartment managers call PG&E's general toll-free customer service number, which is geared toward residential customers. "This industry has kind of fallen into a black hole. They were left out in the cold, if you will," Dennis said. Sacbee.com | SacTicket.com | Sacramento.com Copyright (c) The Sacramento Bee