Albany Utility is billing by projected usage during the January storms, not actual usage

ALBANY — Many Albany residents who were without power for days or weeks after the devastating Jan. 2 storm impacted the city were surprised that their utility bills did not reflect the power outages they experienced.

Much of the frustration was vented on the Albany storm recovery Facebook page or by people who called The Albany Herald to complain.

“What is going on WG&L?” Betty Rehberg posted. “I got my bill today and even though I had zero electricity or gas for five days, my bill did not go down. It went up by 20 cents. How is that possible? I have heard others that had no power for 1/3 of the month say the same.”

“The time period on my bill was December 12 to January 11,” Phil Cody posted. “I was without power from January 2 to January 7. My bill was still $30 more than last month.”

“Seems like a lot of us had a bill of $30 more than normal,” Cathy McCabe Owen posted.

Raymond Akridge, a resident off of Whispering Pines Road in the Dawson Heights area, called The Herald to express his concern.

“We were without power for a full seven days,” Akridge said. “I spent almost $140 on propane and gas for our generator, hoping that I would see a little bit of a break on our utility bill, but it was actually a dollar more than it was the previous month. I think that is wrong. They should bill us for what we used and not for the time we didn’t have power.”

According to Assistant City Manager for the Utility Administration Stephen Collier, many bills were estimated because of storm damage.

“What is common in the industry is to perform an estimation if you can’t get the actual data,” said Collier. “With the devastation of the January 2 storm, we simply could not get in to read the meters and, in some rare cases, the meters were even gone, and we don’t understand that. Maybe the storm blew them away. We have recovered some meters, some contractors have given us some that they picked up, found or have taken out of the meter can because there was significant damage to the structure and the meter can. On those, we are certainly able to go in and extract that data.

“What we did was when we set up our billing software and saw that we could not get in to do an actual reading, we did a three-month estimation. The system knows the kilowatt habits. It’s all tracked and it’s documented.”

Akridge said he had no significant storm damage to prevent Albany Utility employees from reading the meters.

“I didn’t get any damage at my house other than just a few limbs down in the yard,” Akridge said. “Our power was just out for seven days. I had my yard cleaned up the next day. Our meter was not damaged, our house was not damaged and there was no reason why they could not have come out and read our meter.

“We received no explanation whatsoever, just a bill that was one dollar more. I doubt that they will ever take that time off of our bill.”

Collier says he understood the concerns of Albany Utility customers who had interrupted services and said he wanted to assure residents that reconciliation will begin next month.

“…I understand the feeling of the citizens as to how they felt about that bill,” Collier said. “Obviously, their service was interrupted for a number of days and what is going to happen is somewhere around February 10th or whatever, the cycle will start back and we will get those actual readings and we will reconcile.”

Asked if customers would receive a credit on their next bill for the days during which they had no service, Collier explained that the bill would be reconciled not by charging customers for what they actually used, but by projecting what customers would use. After 12 months if the projection was high, he said, for the following 12 months, the projection would be lowered.

“Well, I want to stay away from credit,” Collier said. “Because when I say reconciled, you will be charged more accurately for your usage, so, in other words the system now gathers your data and it will reconcile. Let me explain it this way. When you go to levelized billing, they take a projection and look at your history and then they give you a fee.

“At the end of that 12 months, they readjust it. If they projected it high, for next months they project it at a lower fee.”

Albany City Manager Sharon Subadan was unavailable for comment on why Albany Utility does not charge for actual usage.