The City of Powell has officially given up on trying to collect $18,023 worth of old, unpaid utility bills.

The city council agreed last week to write off the 40 well-past-due accounts.

In a memo to the council, City Administrator Zack Thorington explained that the debts “were placed with a collection agency and are either now over 10 years old and are past the statute of limitations for collection, or the debt has been discharged due to bankruptcy or death.”

It’s an annual exercise for the council, which wrote off a very similar $17,936 worth of unpaid utility bills and penalties last year.

In 2025, the council also gave up on nearly $24,000 worth of municipal court fines, determining that the penalties assessed on 83 different misdemeanor crimes were uncollectible.

All of those citations had gone unpaid for at least nine years, with the oldest being a $30 ticket for shooting off fireworks in March 1996. The largest fine was a $710 citation for possessing a controlled substance in 2015.

As for this year’s $18,000 worth of utility bill write-offs, they represent little more than a rounding error — about 0.16% of the more than $11 million that the city expects to collect from utility payments this fiscal year.

The City of Cody, meanwhile, recently made a larger change: Staff discovered they needed to refund roughly $175,000 to commercial electric customers who’d mistakenly been billed at pricier demand rates for years. According to city figures, those 18 customers will now receive refunds ranging from $729 to $25,259.