DO NOT TRUST City of Minneapolis Websites (At Least When It Comes To Utility Bills)

Photo By John Hoff

I heard this recently from somebody at a title company. She was closing on a property in North Minneapolis and needed to check the utility bill for water, sewer, garbage, etc. She checked the Minneapolis website...

And it said zero dollars, zero cents. To be prudent, she checked it again closer to the closing. Same deal; zero dollars, zero cents.

Per the instructions of the title company, the buyer called Minneapolis to switch the bill over. That's when somebody in Minneapolis finally "looked something up" and, oh gee, there was more than $1,000 owing. If the buyer hadn't called his real estate agent, who passed on the info to the title company, the buyer would have been stuck with a $1,000 water bill. Yeah, try going back and getting that money out of a bank with a bunch of bad mortgages.

SO DO NOT TRUST THE CITY OF MINNEAPOLIS WEBSITE when it comes to utility bills. Actually, that's not the only thing you can't trust on their website...it takes forever to update property ownership, too.

Citizens rely on these websites for vital information and yet most of the City of Minneapolis websites are just clunk, clunk, clunk...junk, junk, junk.