Town calls its phone bill into question

The Saukville Town Hall has two phone lines — one for the town clerk and one for the town treasurer.

Beginning last September, those two lines became the most expensive around as the Town of Saukville’s phone bill shot up for no apparent reason from about $50 a month to about $1,000.

It’s an expensive mystery town officials have been trying to resolve with their provider, AT&T, without much success.

“I don’t think any progress has been made,” town Supr. Curt Rutkowski said. “They started charging a whole lot more without any notice. It was crazy.”

The town currently owes AT&T about $5,600. Officials say they are holding off on paying the bill until they figure out what happened and have it corrected.

“I’ve been focused on getting the services lined up properly,” Rutkowski said. “We need very little — a couple lines and voice mail. We have a fax line and converted it to a fax service.

“We’re going to have to go through some sort of process and circle back and figure out how to address these changes in charges. We don’t have any record of why it happened. My thought process is to stop the bleeding. I need to be convinced we need to pay it.”

Rutkowski said he suspects the situation is related to using a third party some years ago to, ironically, reduce costs.

“We were paying too much back then, a few hundred dollars, and they helped us bring our phone bills down. They got a fee for their services, and it seemed the town signed up for a lot of things they didn’t need,” he said.

The biggest charges seem to be related to a private branch exchange, or PBX, service that allows companies to communicate internally and externally.

It’s a service the town doesn’t need, Rutkowski said.

“We have two people in the office,” he said.

The PBX provider, Centrix Services, also has not been cooperative, Rutkowski said.

The Town Board last week directed Town Attorney Sara MacCarthy to draft a letter to AT&T “to try and get somebody’s attention,” Rutkowski said. “Our efforts don’t seem to be effective.”