Quote:
Originally Posted by Altavia
SECO Energy Announces Increase in Lighting Rates – SECO Energy
What is happening?
– We need to adjust the way we pay for and maintain area light poles in the communities we serve in order to be more accurate and fair to all our members. As a result, you may see an increase in your HOA dues or maintenance assessment in your municipal tax bill.
Why is this increase happening now?
– During the course of a recent cost of services study, we discovered an imbalance in the costs borne by area lighting customers. SECO members in certain parts of our service area weren’t paying their fair share of the costs associated with area lighting.
– Our team alerted the members affected about these needed changes in May.
How will I be affected?
– You will likely see a change in your community maintenance fee. For the average homeowners this could amount to about $5 per month.
Why can’t it stay the way it is?
– SECO is a member-owned, not-for-profit utility. This means that our customers are all members of the co-op. We have a responsibility to all members to operate the utility as efficiently and fairly as possible.
– It just isn’t fair to all of our members if some communities are effectively subsidized by others, and it’s not good accounting. The new approach means that everybody pays their fair share.
|
Keeping your highlights, this just has a bad smell to it.
The current rates seem to have been in place since at least 2020 which is the oldest rate tariff document I can find. How could it have taken over four years to find a $15M imbalance? How could t have taken over four years to notice they were charging $0.18 per day for a pole when the right number was actually $1.31, an error of over 625%?
If it isn't fair to cover the costs with residential customers subsidizing public customers (the CDDs in our case) then in October when the costs are shifted the residential customers should see some savings. $15M/240,000 customers would be about $5/month; not much but something. I will be interested in seeing whether that actually happens.
Instead, what I suspect we will see is no savings at all. My cynicism has me expecting to hear that while the costs were shifted to the CDDs, other costs have increase and my rates will remain the same. This happens all too often.
Since it looks like my CDD maintenance budget will have to increase by the same amount as my savings from shifting the cost, this *could* work out to have zero impact on me. On the other hand, if shifting the cost does *not* result in a savings from SECO but the CDD *does* need to increase the maintenance fee then residential customers in my area will be paying an additional $60 when SECO makes things "fair" for us.