Municipal alliance goes after debtors

People who skip out on city water bills will soon find it more difficult to get away thanks to a new alliance among regional cities.

The Panhandle Regional Recovery Association (PRRA), which became active on March 29, allows member cities to collect overdue accounts on behalf of other member cities.

“You can run, but you can’t hide,” Clarendon City Administrator Sean Pate said of utility debtors.

Under the new system, when a resident leaves Clarendon with a past due water bill and moves to Claude, for example, then that resident must pay the Clarendon bill before Claude will turn on his water service.

The customer is charged a $25 fee, which goes to the PRRA; the collecting city gets 25 percent of the overdue payment; and the city where the account originated collects the remaining 75 percent. The system works on all new and existing accounts.

“When the customer moves to a member city, the individual is notified; and if they don’t pay, they get their water turned off.”

City Hall has about $25,000 in delinquent accounts on its books, but only those accounts that have become delinquent since July 1, 2003, can be entered into the system.

“In the last couple of days we’ve entered into the system 24 accounts  worth about $3,000,” Pate said.

Currently, there are 22 Texas Panhandle cities in the PRRA, and Pate thinks that number will soon increase.

“For it to really work, we need to get all the cities in a 50 mile radius of us to join,” said Pate, who is also a member of the PRRA Board of Directors. “We’re getting one or two new cities every week, and by the next six months, I think we’ll have nearly all the cities in the Panhandle.

The PRRA is the first effort of its kind in the state, and such a system would have been illegal before new legislation took effect last summer under HB 2036. Now, all eyes are on the Panhandle as regional groups in North Central Texas and on the South Plains prepare to form revenue recovery associations of their own.

“We envision it going statewide to the point where if you leave here and move to Texarkana, we’ll still catch you,” Pate said.