It’s becoming almost like a trivia game down at Seventh Avenue and Buchanan Street in downtown Amarillo.
Which public-relations nightmare has causedĀ the most sleepless nights for senior city administrators and council members?
Is it the revelation that the police department withheld from the public that a rapist was running loose?
How about the tempest over the way animal control officers were disposing of unwanted or abandoned pets?
What about the hiring of a traffic engineer who, it turns, out had been under investigation for alleged misdeeds at his prior place of employment?
Let’s add the latest SNAFU to the list. It involves water bills sent the other day to about 12,000 residential customers in southwest Amarillo that, to be charitable, didn’t accurately reflect actual water usage. Utility customers who normally pay about $55 per month for water and sewer use received bills, in some cases, of more than $300.
In the interest of full disclosure, my water bill was not among those affected by the serious misfire.
The city fired eight of its 11 water meter readers on the same day, creating a situation that made it impossible for utility employees to read all the meters, forcing the city to “estimate” water use; residents became furious with the size of their water bills.
This is the best part: The week the water bills went out, the phones went on the fritz at City Hall, meaning residents couldn’t call in to register their concerns or ask questions about their sky-high water bills. Some residents are quoted in the media as believing the phone mess-up was not a coincidence. How does the city persuade an irate constituent that it was?
Wow! I almost don’t know what to say about this.
And on top of all that, we hear from the city’s official spokeswoman, who said: “You know, sometimes when you’ve got someone on the other line going, ‘I need answers!’ you’re just going to make up an answer.”
Holy crap! That is precisely the kind of thing you might think to yourself, orĀ whisper to your colleagues, but you damn sure don’t say such a thing out loud … to the public.
To paraphrase theĀ famed astronaut Jim Lovell: Amarillo, we’ve got a problem.