The Lewis County Public Utilities District Board of Commissioners has announced they are going to be issuing $1.2 million in bill relief to assist residential and small commercial accounts for the month of April in response to the COVID-19 outbreak and the resulting financial hardships many community members and PUD customers are facing.
The PUD’s Board of Commissioners, composed of Ben Kostick, Tim Cournyer, and Ed Rothlin directed staff to reduce customer bills.
“Our PUD is a community-driven organization. We’ve been tightening our belt and making strategic investments that allow us to offer this relief during a time when our customers need it most,” Kostick said.
The PUD is suspending the basic charge for residential and small commercial accounts in the month of April.
“Our customer service department is making adjustments directly to the customer’s bill so no application is necessary. The reduction equals $28.50 per customer and will appear on the usage statements in April,” said PUD General Manager Chris Roden.
The money that is saved by the PUD customers will not have to be paid back at a later date. Roden said that PUD has recently been able to make strategic investments, renegotiate contracts and perform better financially than originally budgeted which has allowed the PUD to be able to offer some rate stabilization and bill relief for the PUD’s customers, Roden said Thursday afternoon.
“We’ve been really scrutinizing our contracts, the price of vendors, where we are putting our money and we are investing it into long-term measures that are starting to pay and so we are taking those savings and because we are publically driven we felt this was very appropriate to give our customers back some of those dividends,” said Roden.
The bill relief also augments the existing low-income programs that are already in place at the PUD. The waived basic charge is only for the days in April so if a customer receives a bill that has half March days and half April days they will only see the reduced price on the April days.
“We wanted to try to get as much of this money out to everybody that’s being affected by this as possible. The great thing about being the PUD is that it’s public to begin with and we’re very much community-focused. Our commissioners are elected locally, our employees are local folks. We just have that mindset of we are driven by our community and can act quickly and appropriately when we see the need and we don’t have to wait for approval,” said Roden.
Roden said that those struggling to pay their March bill can call the PUD to ask for an extension. PUD employees are reaching out to customers individually to work on payment arrangements for those who are struggling to pay their bill at this time.
“It’s important for the PUD to be present and ready to serve while we wait through these times of uncertainty so we are taking all of the actions we need to ahead of time so we can continue to provide electric service and at the same time we have been talking about providing some economic relief where we can,” said Roden.
The PUD has closed their front offices for the time being but the customer service office is staffed and they are conducting business via phone or email. Updates can be found on the Lewis County Public Utility District’s Facebook page or on their website www.lcpud.org/.
