SHREVEPORT WATER METERING - Shreveport’s Mayor Adrian Perkins announced on Facebook this week that the city will soon use new smartphone meter readers to help with water billing issues. The city has had some long-standing problems regarding accurate water meter reading and many customer complaints of overbilling in the past. Each smartphone is loaded with a pre-determined route. A reader enters the water reading and is then required to take a picture of the water meter before moving on to the next property. A GPS location of the reading, along with the rest of the data collected, is automatically uploaded and stored electronically using cloud-based technology. This method is
expected to be effective and cost-efficient compared with how water meters have been read in the past. City workers have been reading all of the department's 81,000 meters manually — including meters that were originally supposed to provide automatic electronic readings. The program will cost the city $33,396 annually and an additional one-time cost of $9,300.
