Greenwood to send multiple utility bills

You won’t get a single bill for Greenwood utility services again anytime soon.

Residents currently get one bill for sewer service, trash pickup and water from Indiana American Water Co. Next month, they’ll get a water bill from the utility company and a separate sewer and trash bill from Greenwood sanitation.

They also will continue to get a separate city bill for the new stormwater utility the city started this year. Greenwood eventually hopes to send residents a single monthly bill for all those utility services, controller Adam Stone said.

The city will take over sewer and trash pickup billing again in November after previously having the utility company send out the bill. The city will hire another employee to help with the job.

You’ll have to continue to write separate checks for the stormwater and sewer utilities.

The city also wants you to mail them in or drop them off separately, Stone said.

He encouraged residents to pay at a drop box outside the city building instead of going inside.

The city used to have a sanitation billing office that billed about 40,000 Greenwood and White River Township residents for the sewer and trash collection utilities. But Greenwood decided to outsource that job to Indiana American Water Co. last year, but the privately owned utility decided to get out of that business and will stop sending bills in November.

Greenwood looked at hiring another company to do all the billing but found it would have cost about $1 million a year. The city is expected to save an estimated $400,000 a year by mailing out all the bills itself, Stone said.

The city plans to hire an employee at a salary of $39,000 a year to help handle the additional workload. Currently, three finance department employees send out the utility bills and another worker devotes about half her time to that work.