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ST. LOUIS — At the beginning of the pandemic, city officials stopped turning off water service to residents who couldn’t pay their bills.

Tens of thousands of St. Louisans were losing their jobs. Officials wanted people to stay home.

Five years later, the pandemic has receded, but city officials have yet to restart shutting off service to those behind on payments.

And the pile of unpaid water bills has now crested $10 million, or about 12% of the water division’s projected budget this year.

Officials in Mayor Tishaura O. Jones’ administration said they planned to restart service shutoffs last year. But an aid program designed to help customers in arrears wasn’t ready in time.

“We have decided to hold off until the planned water utility assistance program is up and running,” Jones spokesman Rasmus Jorgensen said in an email. “The City is working with the vendor to build the program so it can be launched later in the spring.”

At the same time, the move has left a water division — one already strapped for cash — even further behind. The division told aldermen last summer it has more than $100 million in urgent needs, from installing miles of new water mains to replacing the century-old river intake at the Chain of Rocks treatment plant.

In early 2020, as the pandemic was taking off, water departments were pausing water service shutoffs, and St. Louis did, too.

But by the summer of 2023, the St. Louis water department was hurting.

It had gone more than a decade without a rate increase, forcing officials to delay replacement of key equipment and burn through reserves just to keep operating.

In June 2023, aldermen passed a rate hike, the first in 12 years, injecting new money into . By the spring of 2024, they were entertaining the idea of putting some of the Rams relocation settlement money into the system, which could start chipping away at hundreds of millions of dollars in long-term needs.

At a hearing last summer, Curt Skouby, the water department’s commissioner then, told aldermen it was time to return to normal on shutoffs. The division is designed to run on the revenue it collects for providing water service, and it was losing chunks of that revenue.

After four years without shutoffs, Skouby said, bill collection rates had dropped to 75% in fiscal year 2024, down from 87% in 2019. The ranks of delinquent accounts with more than $500 owed or 90 days late had swelled to approximately 19,000 — about a fifth of total accounts.

“It’s reached a point where we absolutely have to start going back and shutting for delinquency,” Skouby said at the June 5 hearing.

The department had begun shutting off delinquent commercial properties in March. He said residential accounts, which make up the vast majority of the department’s accounts, would follow.

“We will start shutting residential accounts later this year,” he said.

Plans were also in the works to soften the blow to those losing service.

Skouby said the department was encouraging people to set up payment plans to avoid losing service. He said the city collector of revenue’s office was working on a new plan that spread payments out over a longer period. And $1 million in federal pandemic relief money had been set aside to help customers in arrears: the city would give some customers up to $500 to pay down their balance.

Eight months later, things haven’t changed.

Niraj Patel, the city’s new water commissioner, conceded that the uncollected money is an issue for the department. But he said it’s not affecting ongoing operations.

He reiterated that there is a plan to return to normal. The department has picked a vendor, United Way, to run its aid program. Once that’s up and running, he said, the department will get in touch with ratepayers to let them know shutoffs are coming back, and then shutoffs will resume.

“The timeline is there,” Patel said.

Aldermen interviewed last week were not ready to call for shutoffs now. But they said the water department has to get paid somehow.

“Any money not coming in is a problem operationally,” said Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer, who has called for more investment in the water system since she sponsored the 2023 rate increase. “The water division needs everything it can get.”

Longtime Alderman Joe Vollmer, of the Hill, couldn’t help a little cynicism when he heard the moratorium was still in place.

“It’s an election year,” he said. “If people get water turned off, they remember who’s in charge.”

Joe Holleman of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.