Jackson, Mississippi
Municipality | AMI Water Meter Solution
Background
The City of Jackson is the capital and largest city in Mississippi. The Jackson Water/Sewer Utilities Division delivers water to roughly 150,000 customers and strives to provide high quality, safe and clean drinking water to its customers.
Challenge
In 2014, Jackson, Mississippi contracted to install a new water meter system, that resulted in a failed implementation. In 2019, the City filed a lawsuit against the meter provider after facing a series of water disasters and expensive attempts at remediation resulting in impending financial catastrophe. A significant number of the 60,000 meters were installed incorrectly and many of the meters failed. During this time, thousands of customers stopped receiving bills while many others received inaccurate bills that jumped to thousands of dollars. The City lost $2 million in revenue per month and more than $20 million the previous year.
In April 2020, the City was successful in litigation and settled the lawsuit for $90 million allowing the City to recover the initial investment. However, Jackson still needed a comprehensive system to track water, detect leaks, and accurately bill for water usage to customers who, unfortunately, had lost trust in the City. City leadership was exhausted trying to course correct and receptive to a metering-as-a-service option and sought help from Sustainability Partners.
Project Description
In November 2020, the City of Jackson signed a Master Utility Service Agreement (“M-USA”) with Sustainability Partners to procure, replace, and maintain a comprehensive water meter system as well as to facilitate the completion of a lead service line inventory and implementation of a new billing system. The agreement included a process to assist in the public procurement of the equipment.
Sustainability Partners enables the City to have the professional services required to support the pre-deployment, deployment, and long-term maintenance of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (“AMI”) throughout its service area. The project comprises installation of more than 65,000 commercial and residential water meters, collectors, data software, billing integration, staff training, and a plan for ongoing maintenance.
During this mass meter exchange, the City faced another devastation when the lack of revenue and maintenance impacted the water treatment plant. The City was unable to provide drinking water to its service area for nearly a month. The Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) and Department of Justice (“DOJ”) installed an Interim Third-Party Manager to oversee the remediation of the entire water system that included the work Sustainability Partners was doing for the City.
Impact
As a very large project rolled out over two years, the City experienced significant changes for the better since the first month of deployment. After just one month of installing new smart water meters, the City recorded $7.2 million in water revenue collections versus $3.6 million the month before.
In addition, the distribution side and customer side acoustic leak detection have proven to mitigate problems by finding leaks and providing alerts to get them fixed before they cause costly problems. Since there was zero upfront capital required from the City, Jackson was also able to reallocate funds to other mission critical initiatives.
The system operates as expected providing up-to-date information enabling the City to provide improved customer service, real-time data, accurate bills, mitigate leaks with acoustic leak detection, reduce energy and water waste, and more. The path has not been easy due to extenuating circumstances in Jackson, but the Interim Third-Party Manager has expressed sincere gratitude for its partnership with Sustainability Partners and plans to collaborate again on future wastewater infrastructure projects.
