The City of Hinesville has become the first municipality in the state of Georgia to implement a new water customer system that offers a customer portal with state-of-the-art evaluation of utility assets and monitoring of efficient daily operations.

“The City is thrilled to be introducing this new and efficient system to better serve our water customers,” said Hinesville City Manager Kenneth Howard.

While the new system, along with new water transmitters, are still being rolled out, city administrators hope to have all 11,000 water customers updated by early 2019.

“We still have roughly 4,000 transmitters to switch out,” said City Engineer Matthew Barrow.

The city began upgrading the city’s meter reading system in late 2016. The new automatic system sends readings automatically to computers in City Hall and the customer portal where water usage can be viewed and monitored. Customers will be able to set usage thresholds and alarms, much like data usage for cell phone customers.

“The benefit of the system upgrade was the actual platform itself that will substantially reduce the amount of man hours needed to read meters,” Barrow explained. “We’re talking a reduction of roughly 75 percent."