By Tim SchmidtRecord Managing EditorWright City officials are taking steps to correct a situation where a few water and sewer accounts were overcharged for being delinquent.City officials said the excessive late fees will be removed. It appears the accounts that were overcharged go back about four months.Aldermen voted 4-0 to adopt a new late penalty fee for water and sewer accounts at their Jan. 8 meeting.A user will now pay a 10 percent penalty the first month the bill is delinquent and 1.5 percent late fee for every month thereafter, according to the policy.City officials recently discovered that some accounts were being charged a 10 percent delinquent fee every month. In at least one instance, the higher penalty resulted in an account increasing monthly by over $1,000 in late fees alone over a period of consecutive months when the wrong penalty fee was being assessed.“There are very few accounts we have to go back and correct,” Alderman Jim Schuchmann said. “We’re not talking that much of a dollar amount except on just a few.”Schuchmann later added, “This has cleared up the language of the ordinance. You could read it two ways. That was not the way the board necessarily intended for it to be.”Last year, the city changed how it handles delinquent accounts and no longer sends out late notices. All utility bills are due by the 10th day of each month. If not paid, the city will proceed with disconnecting services on the 25th day of the month.City purchases meter reading system.Also at the Jan. 8 meeting, aldermen approved spending $15,185 for a new water meter reading system. Of that amount, $1,000 will cover the computer software.The expenditure passed by a 4-0 vote.The city currently uses a handheld reader, but will transition to a laptop-based system.Schuchmann asked that the software agreement be approved contingent on that recent issues the city has faced with its utility billing software be fixed. He described the software as having a “blind spot” where the city is failing to invoice water customers for their usage.“There is no doubt we need the system, but we need the system to work properly,” Schuchmann said.Some Wright City utility accounts overcharged for being delinquent