Richmond’s Department of Public Utilities flagged 80 error alerts within hours of launching a new billing system on May 26, and internal emails show the department then waited 13 days just to get the vendor responsible to agree to a conversation about it. The communications, reviewed as part of a records request covering May through August, document a rollout that went sideways almost immediately and stayed messy for months.
A Rocky Launch From the First Morning
DPU Senior Deputy Director Jamie Porter reported receiving 80 error alerts by 10 a.m. on launch day alone, according to internal emails reviewed by WTVR CBS 6. The new system, built on Oracle and KUBRA technology, was the centerpiece of Project Synergy, a nearly two-year effort to modernize the city’s cloud-based billing. By June, DPU had documented at least 18 defects in the system, many of them rated high impact, the station reported.
Those defects were not abstract line items. Customers saw duplicate meter reads stacked on the same bill, inaccurate charges, missing bills altogether, and autopay profiles that simply never activated. DPU staff told KUBRA on June 11 that Director Scott Morris wanted to discuss the problems directly, and by June 16 a DPU deputy director was describing a requested call with the vendor as urgent, according to the emails cited in the same report.
The 13-Day Wait for a Response
That urgency did not translate into a quick answer. Jamie Porter wrote on June 24 that DPU was still trying to reach KUBRA, and it took a total of 13 days from the department’s initial request for someone at the vendor to agree to even discuss the urgent concerns, per the emails. Morris had said on June 22 that he needed to speak with KUBRA’s executive leadership about both the ongoing issues and what staff described as a communication constraint — a phrase DPU spokesperson Rhonda Johnson later confirmed referred to the delay in getting KUBRA to agree to talk.
When KUBRA Senior Vice President Steve Ryan finally responded on June 26, he apologized to DPU leadership for the severity and impact of the problems and disclosed that disruptions had affected 25% of the department’s customer base, the station reported. Rick Watkin at KUBRA had told DPU two days earlier that he would make himself available immediately. Once executive leadership committed additional resources, KUBRA quickly started daily working sessions and a shared tracker, Alison Copeland said, according to the same emails.
Call Volumes Spiked, Then Slowly Eased
The fallout showed up fastest in the call center. DPU’s average monthly call volume jumped from about 14,400 calls between January and May to nearly 40,000 a month in June and July after the rollout, Axios reported. The Richmonder put more precise numbers on the surge, citing city data showing call-center inquiries rising from 13,686 in May to 39,744 in June and 39,065 in July before drifting back down to 22,689 in August. Axios separately reported DPU averaged just over 22,000 calls that same month.
Billing problems piled up alongside the calls. The emails describe adjustments missing from bills, confusing balances tied to old accounts, incorrect pre-collection notices, and payments that were mistakenly routed to a Canadian server rather than a U.S. one. DPU requested a pause on customer billing on July 21 so staff could validate bills before sending them out, a pause that lasted one week, Johnson said. Scott Morris said a separate Oracle-related issue directly impacted more than 4,000 customers that month, which Johnson later traced to a final product change pushed to production before it was verified.
Thousands Still Waiting on Bills in August
By August 6, an Oracle representative reported that more than 5,700 customers still had not received a bill. DPU’s internal to-do list of billing issues stood at about 10,000 items that same day, down from at least 15,000 the week before. An Oracle representative also said the company had largely stayed on the periphery while the city and KUBRA led the troubleshooting, according to the emails. As late as August 12, DPU was still flagging online-payment failures for customers with closed accounts as a recurring problem, though the department said it implemented a fix for that issue the same day.
KUBRA, for its part, has said its role was limited to presenting finalized data to customers rather than calculating the underlying accounts, bills, or rates — work it says sat elsewhere in the system, according to a separate WTVR report. That same report noted the city entered into contracts worth $15.7 million with Oracle for the two-year project. Alison Copeland told the station that responsibility for a project of this scope is rarely attributable to one party, and that implementations involving multiple partners can surface real challenges.
City Accepts Blame, Points to Lessons Learned
Richmond officials have since acknowledged the rollout fell short on their end too. The city’s own due diligence fell short, and officials relied too heavily on vendors heading into launch, per the Axios report. Rhonda Johnson told CBS 6 that all parties contributed to the rollout problems, but that the city is ultimately responsible to its customers. She said most of the issues documented in the emails were tied to the system transition, though not all of them.
Johnson maintained that no customers were charged late fees connected to the transition and that none were disconnected during it. She said meter readings remained accurate throughout and that misapplied payments tied to the Canadian server routing issue did not occur. Customers with lingering concerns can have their accounts audited for accuracy, she added. Officials have also cautioned that delayed payments, overlapping billing cycles, and unresolved account disputes could still surface for some customers even as the bulk of the rollout problems get resolved, according to Axios.
