City Electric Question & Answer Session Scheduled for May 13

We will have a Q&A session for power bills in the Council Chamber on May 13 at 5:30pm. We won't go over specific bills, but you can ask anything you want. Even if it is not power related we will do our best to answer.

05/14/21 After Meeting

We talked with a few folks for a long time. This was the fourth time we tried this, and only the second time anyone came to ask questions. 

I can sum it up that people are confused about why the billings appear to be so much leaving the feeling that the City of San Augustine is overcharging for services or that we bill extra all the time to make up for losses. Neither of those things are true. The power bills in the City seem overstated against the bills from the Coop outside the City since all our other services such as water, sewer and trash are aggregated there as well. What the City charges is stated clearly on the council approved rate sheet, and the add on has not increased since 2016.

Why did the bills go up so sharply after the Feb Freeze? It is simply that the City's rate from the DETEC is based per contract on the Henry Hub Spot Price for natural gas. It can be found here: 

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdm.htm

I included the graphic on this page so you can see it. The first 4 months of 2021: Jan/2.71 Feb/5.35 Mar/2.62 Apr/2.66  (Dollars per Million Btu)

The coop multiplies the monthly spot price by 0.008 to get our Power Rate per KWH. (There are some misc fees for line loss and so forth, but the energy charge is the main one.) You can see Feb natural  gas spot price is x1.974 of January which got passed on to us (almost double). What no one seems to appreciate is that while other customers in places further west were getting crazy, ridiculous bills, our contract protected the residents here from anything except variations in gas which is predominantly used for generation.

The City only bills per the Council approved rates, and only for what is consumed per the meter at individual residences and shops.