Every January, about 29,000 Snohomish County PUD customers get an odd bill telling them what they owe for their streetlights.
The bills are sent to the customers who don’t live in a city and have to sign up with a local utility district to pay their neighborhood light bill.
The average bill is $25.85 a year. The most expensive bill for 2004 is $313.72, and the cheapest is 57 cents.
| The Snohomish County PUD plans a public hearing on a proposal to change how it bills some customers for streetlight service. The hearing will be at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday at PUD headquarters, 2320 California St., Everett. For more information, call 425-783-8611. |
Most people pay the bills, but many become suspicious. About 1,500 customers call the PUD and ask what it’s all about every time the special bills go out.
Others forget to pay the bill or toss it out, thinking that it’s some kind of scam.
For all those reasons, customers owe the PUD more than $200,000 in unpaid streetlight bills. The bill for delinquent or absent-minded residents comes due when they try to sell their house, because the only way for the PUD to get its money is to put a lien on the property owner’s home.
To end all the confusion, the PUD wants to fold streetlight bills into the regular electricity bills it sends out to customers. The three PUD commissioners will vote on such a proposal at their Tuesday meeting.
Making things even simpler, the PUD proposes to go to one fixed rate -$1.69 a month for all 29,000 streetlight customers.
The changes will mean about a 20 percent break for the average streetlight district customer. However, because rates vary under the existing system, some customers will see their rates go up slightly.
“Once we explain what we want to do, most customers say it seems like a good idea,” said Neil Neroutsos, a PUD spokesman.
Kathy Wunderlich of Maltby is certainly looking forward to the changes. “I think it will be a whole lot easier to pay the bill,” she said, especially since her bill will go down. “Saving anything will be important.”
The PUD pays more than $750,000 a year to operate the county’s 6,000 streetlight districts. It expects to save about $100,000 a year by folding the billings into its regular billing system.
Without the change, the PUD estimates it would have to spend thousands of dollars upgrading the antiquated billing system it uses for the streetlight districts, which could cause its rates to go up.
The PUD commission plans a public hearing on the plan at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday at PUD headquarters, 2320 California St., Everett. Call 425-783-8611 for more information.
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