Photo via Formulanone/Flickr
The petition is addressed to Gov. Rick Scott, the Florida Legislature, the Florida Department and the contractor Conduent.
"We use these toll roads for work, vacation, school, church and other places," the petition reads. "Some of us who depend on the SunPass to collect tolls for work are not able to get the transaction activity to get reimbursed from our employers. Now when the system goes back and running again, it's going to be a huge bill for people that have been using SunPass since June 1. [...] Why should we, the SunPass customers, have to pay for tolls while the system was down when it was the fault of Conduent and SunPass?"
In an email, Dimauro said the SunPass billing delays and prolonged system outages have caused problems for people like him "who have limited income and need to work in order to survive."
It's been a month and a half since SunPass underwent maintenance that was supposed to last a week.
The agency was updating the system, which ended up crippling the electronic toll collector and its customers with a huge backlog of unprocessed transactions. SunPass has apologized and asked for patience.
When the system first went down for maintenance on June 1, customers were still being charged for tolls. On June 21, FDOT announced that fees posted during that specific time period would be waived by SunPass and the Florida Turnpike Enterprise.
Conduent, the contractor responsible for managing the electronic technology and posting toll transactions, was given a 10-day notice at the end of June by FDOT to fix all issues and, well, nothing really changed. Now, FDOT just announced they are suspending all payments to Conduent until the system is thoroughly fixed and requiring the contractor to "give the record a financial record" of each day's transaction progress.
Conduent and FDOT are currently heading into the third year of their seven-year $287 million contract.
It turns out that Conduent State & Local Solutions has an unsettling record when it comes to updating tolling systems and insufficient customer service in at least seven other states, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
State officials originally said that the contractor will continue to process "at least 8 million charges each day," referring to the nearly 100 million pending transactions that piled up over the past month and a half. However, since last Wednesday, only four more million transactions have been processed, reports the Times. Authorities said Conduent would be held "fully accountable" for the delays and will face penalties under contract clauses.
The system shutdown was intended to upgrade the SunPass system and consolidate a group of electronic tolling authorities into the Centralized Customer Service System.
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