Pearland water customers will see a change in their water bills over the next three months following the adoption of a new plan by City Council to end the city’s 32/30 plan.

Pearland City Council at its July 11 regular meeting approved an option that will end the 32/30 plan months earlier than expected. Under the new option, Pearland will accelerate bill dates for all cycles of the city’s water customers until the end of October.

“I think anything that can complete and get 32/30 done faster is good,” Mayor Kevin Cole said. “It checks a box. It gets that part of it over with.”

Under the new adopted plan, Pearland water customers will receive three bills in a span of 84-88 days with the final bill coming in October. According to agenda documents, all Pearland customers in Cycles 11, 12 and 13 will receive their bills 30 days apart for July and August. For September and October bills will be either 28 or 29 days in between the previous bill.

For Cycle 14 customers, only July’s bill will be 30 days apart from the previous bill. Cycle 14 customers will receive their August bills 28 days apart, the September bill 29 days apart and October bills 27 days apart.


Once November rolls around, the city will return to a regular monthly read cycle. According to agenda documents, the new schedule will incorporate all 365 days of the year by billing at 30 days from March to September, and 31 days from October to February. In the leap year of 2024, March will be read in 31 days.

The 32/30 plan was created in 2020 to solve an issue caused by the city choosing to move to a 28-day billing period at the end of 2018 that created a 71- to 78-day gap in revenue between the city’s water customers’ billing read date and bill date.

Under the 32/30 system, the city read meters on a 32-day cycle and billed residents every 30 days, and it would have ended depending on the billing cycle a customer was on anywhere from December to early 2023.

The disputed 32/30 plan had been a contentious issue since its implementation in 2020. The plan to end 32/30 sooner was unanimously passed by council on July 11. Cole said Council Members Joseph Koza and Jeffrey Barry were the ones that pushed the issue back to council.


While the item itself to implement the new plan unanimously passed, the amendment to accept Option 1 passed in a 5-1 vote with Council Member Adrian Hernandez voting against Option 1 because he was in favor of Option 2 that would have affected only Cycle 14 customers who would have received three bills within 85 days.

Hernandez said he preferred focusing on those 14,000 customers and making sure they knew what was happening instead of a plan that affected all of the city’s water customers.

With the passing of the new plan July 11, Cole said the city’s communication with its water customers will be crucial as the city looks to avoid creating public confusion with the change and increased bill frequency in a shortened time frame.

“I’m confident we will be able to communicate this as well as we can,” Pearland Director of Communications Joshua Lee said. “There is always a rule of thumb that we are not going to hit 10% of our audience, but it won’t be from the lack of trying.”