A completely full parking lot at the Aurora Rec Center on a Tuesday night might mean a rec league basketball final is underway or an oddly-scheduled community theatre production. But surely, a town hall about utility company billing practices, in a town of just over 7,500, wouldn't attract an absolutely packed house.
But that assumption on June 10 was wrong.
Last February, the Missouri Public Service Commission ordered its staff to investigate the billing practices of Liberty Utilities. As a part of that investigation, the staff scheduled a series of four town halls in southwest Missouri to gather information from the public — the first of which took place on June 10 in Aurora. Over the course of four and a half hours, the estimated 230 people (according to the PSC) expressed their concerns. What follows is an attempt to summarize the main points of that meeting.
Note: Liberty Utilities underwrites Ozarks Public Broadcasting. This does not influence our coverage. We cover them like we cover any other organization.
The players
We’ll start with Liberty. Liberty Utilities is a regulated utilities company owned by Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp., a Canadian conglomerate which also owns Liberty Power (their power generation subsidiary, referred to collectively with their utilities business as “Liberty”) and Bermuda Electric Light Company (the sole provider of electricity in the British overseas territory of Bermuda).
In 2017, they acquired Empire District Electric Company, whose coverage area is now Liberty’s “Central Territory.” Serving about half the counties in the state of Missouri, they provide some combination of electricity and/or water to something like 320,000 customers. Though mostly concentrated in Missouri, Liberty also operates in pockets of Illinois, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Iowa. In addition to a number of higher-ranking representatives who spoke at the meeting, Liberty brought a team of customer service employees for the public to speak with.
The Public Service Commission is a five-member body appointed by the governor that makes regulatory decisions regarding regulated utilities. They’re in charge of the PSC staff, an advisory team of experts in law, economics, and so on who are separate from the PSC — they provide recommendations that the commission can follow or ignore. Though no PSC commissioners were present at the town hall, several members of the staff were.
There’s also the Office of Public Council, which argues on behalf of the general public before the commission. If PSC cases are roughly analogous to court cases, the OPC is roughly analogous to a prosecutor, challenging rate hikes or other requests that utility companies send to the PSC. The OPC had probably the smallest presence of all the agencies in attendance, primarily represented by chief economist Dr. Geoff Marke.
The timeline so far
Over a year ago, Liberty implemented new software across the company. As the representatives admitted at the top of the town hall, the transition came with issues. More specifically, about 10% of Liberty customers experienced some kind of billing issue, with many of those issues concentrated in communities in which Liberty was both the water and electric provider. One of those communities was Aurora (as well as some smaller neighboring towns such as Miller), but there have also been high incidences of problems in Joplin, Branson and Ozark — the locations of the other town halls held last week.
In November of last year, Liberty filed a request to increase the base electricity rate for customers in the southwest part of the state. A few months later, they amended that request from a nearly 16% increase to a nearly 30% increase, which would, if approved, increase monthly household bills by $33-$39 — citing a clerical error on their part in the earlier request. The approval process takes nearly a year, and the PSC is set to make a decision in January 2026.
The PSC had been receiving complaints about Liberty’s billing since November, and the day after Liberty submitted the amended request, the Commission ordered the staff to open an investigation with updates submitted every three months. This brings us to the Aurora meeting, the first of four intended to gather information for the both the investigation and Liberty’s response to it, though some of the concerns may also be addressed in the rate case hearings, according to PSC representatives.
Wrong bills, not enough bills, too many bills
The most common complaint among attendees was receiving bills either late or not at all, often with erroneous charges. Many customers reported late fees for failing to pay these bills on time, sometimes for months in a row. When they called customer service to get these fees removed, customer service over the phone tended to be of low quality, with representatives struggling to answer questions satisfactorily.
Take, for example, Charity Tweed, city clerk for the town of Miller. Tweed said that errors started appearing in the city’s bills in March 2024, including taxes that the (tax-exempt) city should not have been charged. Though she initially “extended grace” to the company, knowing firsthand the problems that come with software migration, she said that over several months of calls, representatives (including management) said they had no direct line to billing — handled by an external company, KUBRA.
Eventually, a customer service representative established herself as Tweed’s direct contact and was able to resolve some issues. But more problems started cropping up, she said, including city sales tax being charged to residents (who weren’t supposed to receive that charge). Then, last April and May, the city received no bill at all. Tweed mentioned Liberty’s habit of sending bills the day they’re due, which prompted a chorus of “yups” from the audience. The direct contact eventually sent those bills and taught Tweed how to use the online billing system — “by the way,” said Tweed, “your online billing system sucks,” drawing applause — but then the city received a bill for the already-paid-for streetlights, three days in a row, which customer service reps said was a system error on KUBRA’s part.
“I’m a very calm, very patient, very kind person,” said Tweed. “But when I fight for answers for the city for over nine months, [that’s] unacceptable. I’m not the only one who’s upset, the aldermen and the mayor were upset too.”
“I guess, from my perspective, are you still having issues?” asked Liberty representative Tim Wilson. Tweed replied that there hadn’t been problems for a while, and Wilson continued: “I’m sorry you went from that, and I would be frustrated too…we’re living that every day, we’re doing our best to get better, and it sounds like at least we’ve gotten you fixed up for a couple of months. We’ll work on the confidence.”
Re-establishing confidence was a running theme with the Liberty representatives, who at least tried to maintain an apologetic tone throughout the meeting. “We have to earn your confidence back,” said Wilson at the top of the meeting, “and that’s why we’re here — believe me, it’s not fun. And I’m not asking for sympathy, by the way.”
Among customers, stories similar to Tweed's three-bill stretch were common. Aurora City Council member Theresa Pettit —who also experienced municipal-level issues with Liberty, which prompted the offer of a meeting with city council and which explaining would require enough context as to comprise an entirely new article — probably holds the record for the night, having received 18 in one week.
“But when you’re going to have to do a refund, I’ll just take it in one envelope,” she remarked.
The most shocking number came from Audra Lauffer, who said that she went 10 months without receiving a bill before a customer service rep told her that she nor her husband were in the system. She eventually started receiving bills with either a zero balance or a credit before, the Monday preceding the town hall, receiving a bill for $10,229.44 (which she brough, and passed to the Liberty representatives who looked at it in disbelief).
More broadly, Lauffer complained of extremely high electric rates — another extremely common sentiment among attendees. She said that the electric bill for her home was more than her mortgage and her child’s college tuition (comparisons to other recurring expenses were a common theme throughout the night) and that when she called the neighboring Ozark Electric to ask what her rates would be there with the same level of power usage, the cost was “nothing” compared to her bill with Liberty.
“I have been treated like dirt,” she said.
Solar Power
Two exchanges during the meeting centered on home solar energy production and seemed to indicate a running issue in that area as well. Both were somewhat convoluted (in part, due to how high tensions were at this point in the evening).
Virginia Swayne said that, for a period of time, most of her bills were on the lower end — she attributed that to the solar panels installed on her home. But last January or February, she received a bill for over $900. After calling customer service, she was told that, due to either an accounting issue or a meter issue, she hadn’t been billed correctly for six months and owed Liberty money. Swayne asked the representatives at the town hall, if either accounting or the power meter failed, how did the company determine how much she owed?
Company representatives said they couldn’t answer the question without looking into the precise details of the account. Swayne then claimed to have recently received a call from the owner of her mother’s old house — which she sold more than two years ago — who told her that Liberty never actually turned on the solar (whether Swayne was referring to the physical solar panels or the billing credit was unclear).
When asked by someone from the crowed what Liberty’s plan to address billing issues was, Wilson responded that Liberty had developed a plan in collaboration with the PSC, and OPC and had been meeting with those agencies monthly to discuss their progress.
“We’re like, 95% accurate,” Wilson said.
Tisha Amelio, shortly after, centered her comment around solar power as well. She and her husband were confused as to what was being done with the excess electricity their panels produced. The Liberty reps didn’t seem to entirely understand what Amelio wanted to know and explained that, even if they were producing excess power, they would still be charged a customer fee and taxes.
“You’re stealing our power,” Amelio burst out.
The tension in the room tightened. It eventually became clear that the Amelios were trying to schedule by which they would be paid for the excess electricity they were producing, having not been paid for it at all at this point.
During both Swayne and Amelio’s comments, Marke was visibly nodding, and made a vaguely affirmative pointing motion when Amelio made her accusation. After both comments, he asked the speakers to reach out to the OPC, remarking that solar power in particular is something the office is looking into.
Missourians in this coverage area have, historically, had a hard time being paid for their solar electricity. In 2015, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against the Empire District Electric Company, erasing a law which exempted the company from paying solar rebates to customers passed to pre-empt a ballot initiative that would have forced the company to do so.
More concerns pile up
Over the course of the evening, attendees brought up a slew of other complaints. A few speakers expressed suspicion of Algonquin’s Canadian origins, to which the Liberty representatives responded by assuring them that they, and the vast majority of Liberty’s direct managerial staff, lived close by. One sticking point was the securitization charges applied in the wake of Winter Storm Uri, which was a struggle to explain effectively until eventually Marke stepped in and said that in this case, Liberty was doing the right thing. A common issue was the seemingly obtuse nature of the new smart meters, which Missouri residents will soon be able to opt out of due to a recent state law.
Many attendees had trouble with the actual, physical process of paying bills. Elderly residents especially struggled to pay on the Liberty website, and several complained that although the local Walmart acted as a place to pay their bill, they couldn’t pay by check there. One resident said that she drove to Joplin on a monthly basis just to pay at the Liberty office located there. The demand for an in-person Liberty representative available to talk to in Aurora recurred so often that, although Wilson said he couldn’t guarantee it on the spot, he indicated that he was receptive to the idea.
What this reporter struggled to convey is both the breadth and depth of people’s discontent. Speakers often came with complex billing issues, which customer service representatives had failed to address for months on end. Yet the fact that they were trying to explain these issues with, at best, a few printed out bills in the middle of a crowded town hall did no favors to their ability to find a solution.
To the credit of Liberty, people often began their comments by thanking the company for their work restoring power in the wake of April’s storms. Representatives also seemed to be trying their best to answer people’s questions to the best of their ability, in one case directing a struggling customer to an employee specifically hired to help people navigate benefit programs. Still, residents with ongoing issues were often told to contact customer service — a refrain that customers were obviously exhausted of hearing and that reps were obviously exhausted of repeating.
Other meetings, and what happens next
The other meetings were similarly attended. Forrest Gossett, public information officer for the PSC, said that the Branson meeting filled city hall, the Ozark meeting went four hours (and would have gone longer had the building not closed) and that the Joplin meeting was also packed. The concerns people expressed were roughly the same, and they expressed them in much the same manner — politely but clearly upset.
The electric rate case hearings are scheduled for July. PSC staff will continue to investigate Liberty’s billing and customer service practices and collect comments on the case website (there are currently over 300), with the next formal report due July 30. Depending on their findings, the staff of the OPC may choose to file a formal complaint in front of the commission, which Marke indicated is likely.
“I can confidently say,” he told Audra Lauffer with the $10,000 bill, “there will be some pursuing moving forward.”