In January the City Council paid off $48,407.55 in overdue electric bills that the Department of Public Works had been carrying, in some cases, for more than ten years. The explanation the city gave is four sentences long and worth reading closely.
“DPW pays over 80 invoices for Eversource each month and carries past due balances on several accounts,” the request to the council said. “The amounts are the result of unpaid invoices and misapplied payments that took place for more than a decade. We have diligently cleaned up all possible payments since 2022 and now request funding to make a one-time payment to clear our past due balances.”
What was behind
The arrears were spread across the accounts that keep the city lit. The order lists $14,285.20 on buildings and grounds lighting, $13,894.50 on street lights and $2,927.90 on park lighting, among others. The Willow Street Park account, in a bill attached to an earlier packet, carried a balance flagged as due immediately to avoid possible service disconnection.
The Eversource money was the overwhelming majority of a $49,471.31 prior-year bill package, the first of at least three the council has approved in 2026. The city has now paid roughly $160,000 this year for goods and services delivered in earlier years, a pattern we wrote about when the September package came through carrying a state unemployment notice and construction invoices from 2020.
Two things the record does not explain
The first is how it happened. “Misapplied payments” over more than a decade means money the city sent that was credited somewhere other than where it belonged, on accounts nobody reconciled. More than 80 invoices a month is a lot of paper, and street lighting accounts are exactly the kind that generate no complaint when they go wrong, because the lights stay on while the balance grows.
The second is who noticed. The cleanup began in 2022, which the memo mentions without saying what prompted it. The city auditor’s office is the natural place to ask, and the council did not ask in the meeting record.
This is not a large sum against a $272 million budget. It is a small window into the city’s accounting, and it opened at the start of the same year in which free cash is falling from $32.4 million toward roughly $5 million, and in which the administration has come back to the council three times for money to pay old bills. The council approved the package on January 28 by a roll call of 9 to 0, with Councillors Deron Hines and Kelly Garcia absent. The minutes record no discussion of how the balances accumulated.