WM Utility writes off $350K in bad debt

WM Utility writes off $350K in bad debt

Defunct hospital arrears officially off the books

news@theeveningtimes.com

The West Memphis Utilities Commission dismissed uncollected debt from 2014 during the last meeting of the year. A hard pill to swallow, the commissioners wrote off the bad debt after a short discussion.

The largest single unpaid bill on the books was from the failed Crittenden Regional Hospital.

The hospital shut the doors in August of 2014 after it couldn’t pay any bills.

Even with the help of a one percent sales tax to save the hospital, CEO Gene Cashman closed CRH unexpectedly when suppliers demanded cash on delivery and the Hospital board declared bankruptcy. A lawsuit over unpaid health insurance premiums for hospital is just now approaching settlement. Likewise Utilities Commissioners finished their business with CRH and closed the books on the old hospital dismissing the six figure debt.

Commissioner noted no relief for the past due hospital utilities came out of the bankruptcy procedure as they wrote off bad debt from the last half of 2014.

“If you take the hospital out it would look a lot better, “said Utilities Manager John Rimmer. “But the hospital is $150,000 of that is the hospital.”

$132,000 of that was for the hospital building itself and the rest of the CRH unpaid bills came from its satellite office buildings.

Commissioner Dana Parker asked the question that crossed the mind of most everybody in the room.

“We got nothing out of the bankruptcy?” asked Parker. Rimmer nodded the confirmation.

Commissioner Jerry Burns noted these bills were left over from the defunct hospital operation and were not associated with the county keeping the lights on until Arkansas Community Corrections emerged as the next tenant in the County building.

“That’s before the County took over,” said Burns.

“That’s a hard break.”

The write off on the uncollected utility bills for the second half of 2014 were $348,500. That sum combined with semi-annual write off for city customers done earlier in the year totaled just over $800,000 the Utilities company swallowed this year for 2014 debt.

Moving forward Commissioners allocated just $375,000 for write off against the 2017 proposed budget. Todd Pedersen noted that recent changes improvements in the shutoff policy coupled with the a staff person dedicated to timely disconnections had already slowed the pace.

That along with looking at automated metering in the next year was expected to improve the future write off burden.

By John Rech