If you’re a resident in St. Martinville you may have received a text message saying your utility bill is due after you paid.
St. Martinville business owner Jessica Alexis, owns a body shop and detailing shop as well as three homes. She received over ten text messages this month saying she had to pay her utility bills, even after paying on time.
“They say that the electricity was not paid and if it wasn’t paid by a certain amount or date, that they would go ahead and disconnect the electric utilities,” Alexis said.
Alexis went down to city hall to solve the issue.
“First percaution was I went online and I checked my account to make sure that everything went through and then afterwards I went to city hall,” Alexis said.
"They weren’t sure, so then I went back spoke with Ms. Shicka Hector, she confirmed everything was paid, that they were having problems with the text messages coming through even after the customers had applied the payment.”
City of St. Martinville Blling Supervisor Shicka Hector said on February 8th the city stopped business with its online utility payment service “Abcomp” due to communication issues with the company.
They switched to “Citzen Action Center,” and even after the switch Abcomp continued to text customers for the rest of the month.
“We’ll we’ve reached out to the old online services we’ve asked them to stop the messages,” Hector said.
“I’m not sure what’s going on on that end so that’s why at this point what we’re doing is requesting that customers just to reply stop to the message.”
Hector said more than half of the city’s residents have called asking about their utility bill.
“We’ll they’re just letting us know hey I have my confirmation number, I have my receipt I have my confirmation number, I know I’ve paid so what’s going on,” Hector said.
Alexis said as a business owner trying to resolve utility issues during a workday is diffficult.
“We need it as a reminder but we just wish that it wouldn’t text us as many times,” Alexis said. “Especially if we have multiple units that require electricity case we wanna make sure that you know it kind of scares us and then have to leave our business and then go down to city hall.”
Hector said they encourage their customers who’d like to pay their bill in person to come prepared with the bill and payment ready. Another way to pay is through the City of St. Martinville’s app.
