The late tax bills have caused confusion in recent days, since the extension wasn’t printed on the bill. Online bill pay was not affected, Smiley spokesperson Josh Estrella said.
Estrella said the bills were mailed late because budget negotiations with the City Council were “delayed by a week,” even though the council passed the budget on June 27, ahead of the July 1 deadline. (Smiley signed the budget into law the next day, on June 28.)
Estrella also said the city’s printing vendor, JLS Mailing Services, was impacted by the July 19 CrowdStrike outage, which “further delayed our vendor’s ability to properly apply postage and mail tax bills.”
The printing company did not immediately comment.
The global tech outage caused havoc at airports, hospitals, banks and other businesses running Microsoft products. CrowdStrike said a bug in a software update resulted in bad data being sent out to millions of computers.
City Council President Rachel Miller criticized the mayor for the late bills, calling it an “administrative error” on Smiley’s part and noting the timeline to pass the budget was “not at all unusual.”
“It is puzzling that the mayor’s office would misrepresent this situation after such a fruitful and collaborative budget negotiation that resulted in increased funding for education, parks, and libraries,” Miller said in a statement. “I am disappointed by the unnecessary confusion this has caused homeowners and bewildered by the finger pointing. Sometimes, leadership means owning your mistakes. I hope that administrative mistakes like this do not plague taxpayers in the future.”
Asked what had delayed the mailings prior to the July 19 software outage, Estrella said it takes 10 to 14 business days for the printing process including “mock ups, approval and then physical printing and mailing to occur in addition to a file transfer.” The process can’t begin until the city budget is signed into law, which includes the tax rates and a spending plan.
“The dates printed on the tax bills will always be reflective of the required due date from the levy ordinance and cannot be changed,” Estrella said. “When there is a delay, the city extends the grace period for tax bills and notifies the community by email, through PVD 311 push notifications, social media and our website.”
Providence state Senator Sam Bell also criticized Smiley, noting that his own tax bill was postmarked July 22.
“Brett Smiley promised to make Providence the best-run city in America,” Bell wrote on social media. “Screw-ups happen. If you care about good management, when you screw up, you apologize and do your best to make things right.”
Asked to respond to Bell on WPRO radio Monday morning, Smiley did apologize. He noted that many homeowners are not impacted if they pay their taxes through an escrow account.
“It looks bad, it’s a little embarrassing, and I’m sorry for that,” Smiley said. “Anybody listening, you don’t have to pay your bill until Aug. 16.”
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Steph Machado can be reached at steph.machado@globe.com. Follow her @StephMachado.