Tallapoosa River Electric Cooperative Monday - Friday 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. P.O. Box 675 15163 Highway 431 South LaFayette, AL 36862
Board of Trustees C.B. Parker, Jr. President District 6 - Daviston
John Adcock Vice-President District 2 - Woodland
Bruce Boswell Secretary/Treasurer District 1 - Seale
Rusty Robinson District 4 - Seale
Phillip Bryant District 7 - Opelika
Jeff “Bodine” Dodgen District 5 - LaFayette
Mary Ann Walker District 3 - Opelika
To pay your bill online: Go to www.trec.coop and click “Payment Options.” Save time and money! In case of POWER OUTAGES day or night CALL... 1-877-456-8732
4 APRIL 2017
Cost of service Louie Ward Manager of Tallapoosa River EC Last year the Cooperative’s Board of Trustees took a comprehensive look at the cost associated with providing electric service to all rate classes. This process is commonly done through a process called a cost-of-service study. This cost-of-service study took an in-depth look at all the costs associated with providing electric service to the Cooperative’s membership to make sure the various rate classes, whether residential, commercial, industrial, and even outdoor lighting, pays their own fair share of the costs. This gets fairly detailed, so please be patient as I try to explain how this may affect you. Upon reviewing the cost-of-service study, the Board of Trustees voted to make some adjustments to the residential rate and some commercial/industrial members of the Cooperative. For residential members, the rate adjustment is not an overall increase in rates, but rather a restructuring of the present rate. In order to accomplish this, the Board increased the customer service charge and decreased the energy charge. Again, this is on residential bills. Residential meters account for approximately 95% of the bills we send out. The customer service charge of a bill is the monthly charge the Cooperative charges for you to have a meter at any given location whether or not any electricity is consumed. The customer service charge is in place to cover the Cooperative’s costs for installing and maintaining poles, wire, transformers, meters, substations and the like. Did you know that maintenance costs are the same for metered locations whether they consume no electric energy or a lot of electric energy? In other words, if you have an abandoned meter pole and pay a minimum bill or if you have a full time residence consuming a large quantity of electric energy each and every month, it costs the Cooperative the same amount
for you to be able to consume electric energy. Additionally, the customer service charge covers the cost of preparing and mailing the monthly bills and maintaining records. These costs are the fixed costs the Cooperative incurs whether you actually use any electricity at a given location. The present customer charge for residential accounts of $15.00 was set in 2014. Billings as of April 1 will include a customer charge of $20.00. Then to offset the minimum bill increase, the board lowered the energy rate for residential bills. The energy rate will be reduced by 4.23 mills to make an intended revenue change neutral for the Cooperative. The board made no change for industrial members. Your board spent many hours debating these changes and how they will have the least impact on the membership as a whole. At the bottom of the page for your convenience we have included a basic example of how this changes a 1200 kWh bill. On behalf of the Board and the employees, we hope these changes are not hard to understand. If you have any specific questions, please give us a call. n Example: Former bill for 1200 kWh was $146.43 New bill for 1200 kWh is $146.35
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