Water bills in parts of Lexington went unsent. What to know if yours is missing
Thousands of homeowners in at least two municipalities in Lexington County were left wondering how much they owed for their water in April after the company that sends out water bills for both towns gave abrupt notice Friday that it was closing.
Town officials in both Batesburg-Leesville and the town of Lexington were informed that Professional Mail Services, Inc., the Raleigh-based third-party mailing service that the towns used to send out physical bills in the mail, was closing and would not send out water bills to more than 20,000 residents – 2,800 in Batesburg-Leesville and 17,600 in Lexington. The closure only impacted those who receive physical bills and not customers who were signed up for paperless billing.
“They had not given us any indication,” Batesburg-Leesville Town Administrator Jay Hendrix told The State. The town of a little over 5,200 typically finalizes water bills by the end of the month, sends that data to the printing company and then approves the final bills before the printing company ships them out around the beginning of the month.
They started to be concerned, Hendrix said, when they didn’t get confirmation in April about the bills being sent out. The town was completely blindsided, Hendrix said. They’d been using Professional Mail Services since 2018.
“Our utility billing director had reached out the first of last week, like, ‘Hey, what’s going on? Our customers haven’t received bills, we haven’t heard anything,’” Hendrix said. “We were ghosted. Emails to multiple staff members there that we normally communicated with weren’t being replied to, they weren’t answering phones. They weren’t answering the toll-free number on the website.”
Phone calls and an email sent to the company by The State were not immediately answered. No one answered the toll-free number on Professional Mail Services’ website. The company hadn’t filed a WARN report – or an advanced notice of closure or mass layoffs by a company with a certain number of employees – as of May 15. It’s unclear how many employees the company had or whether it would have been required to file a report. The company had not filed for bankruptcy.
Hendrix said the staff at Batesburg-Leesville reached out to Lexington to give them a heads up about the closure. A spokesperson for Lexington said the town confirmed with the company that its last day in operation was May 9 and that they were given no explanation. Lexington had contracted with the company since the fall of 2019 and paid around $11,000 a month for printing and mailing services.
“We have found another vendor and sent out paper bills on May 13, 2025 (so this only impacts the May bills). There will be no penalties and no disconnections related to this issue. The bills will look a little different this month, but we are working to get everything back to normal for the next billing cycle,” Lexington spokesperson Laurin Barnes said in an email to The State.
Batesburg-Leesville had already paid the company around $2,100 for the month of April, even though it will not receive the services. Hendrix said the hope is to recoup that money from the company. A separate company that the town uses for its billing software, not physical letters, added a mailing option to its services a few years ago, Hendrix said, but the town decided to stick with Professional Mail Services at the time.
Batesburg-Leesville will go through an emergency procurement process next week to select a new vendor for next month’s bills, Hendrix said. If the town can’t sort out the bills this month, it’ll just tack them on to next month’s.
“Nobody’s water will be turned off because of this issue. We understand that it’s an inconvenience for the public and we’re here to help and they’re welcome to stop by [town hall] but if they want to wait until the bill comes in June, that’s fine, too,” Hendrix said.
