The Santa Barbara City Council approved an ordinance Tuesday that allows the city to consolidate residential and commercial customers’ trash, water, and sewer bills into one invoice when the different bills belong to the same individual at the same address.

The combined bill will be due when the occupant’s water bill would otherwise would be, according to the city.

Environmental Services Manager Matt Fore said there is currently no set date to consolidate the bills; The city’s current priority is ensuring that the affected residents and businesses are aware of the change.

“Before we do it, we’ll be notifying the customers well in advance, and we’ll make sure everybody knows the timing of it,” he said.

Some residents and businesses already have consolidated bills.

Fore said that the majority of the consolidations will affect businesses, which sometimes “have two different invoices going to the same customers for the same service address.”

Individual utilities will still be broken down in the consolidated bill — an important consideration for Santa Barbarans keeping an eye on their water consumption.

“It’s really just a housekeeping item,” said Fore.

“For us, to have an additional thousand accounts or something in our billing system, it’s not efficient. And every time we’re handling more than one account, the chances for error increase, so we just want to clean that up and have as streamlined a billing system as we can.”

— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.