Faced with another spike in the school district’s power bill, local trustees plan to ask their counterparts at the City of Penticton for some relief.
The planned 4.4 per cent electricity rate increase on Feb. 1 will translate into a $22,000 hit to the Okanagan Skaha School District by the end of June, the board heard at its regular meeting Monday.
Secretary-treasurer Bonnie Roller Routley said the district’s utility bills from the city have risen by an estimated $280,000 since 2012-13 to almost $1.2 million annually.
She also noted an analysis prepared in 2012 showed the district was paying $300,000 more for power each year than any other district its size in B.C.
Roller Routley recommended trustees ask Penticton’s mayor and council for a meeting to outline their concerns directly.
“It’s not a conversation of management to management; this is a conversation between elected officials,” she said.
It’s unlikely any such meeting will have an impact this year though.
Just hours before trustees began discussing the need for a meeting, city council put the final stamp of approval on its 2015 budget, which confirmed the electricity rate hike and an overall 1.3 per cent tax increase.
Penticton Mayor Andrew Jakubeit said Tuesday he’d still be willing to meet with trustees to discuss ways the district could lower its utility bills, such as using reclaimed water to irrigate sports fields, but he could not commit to a break on power rates.
“The first step is really to meet,” he said.
“We are going to look at some of our rate structures in the electrical utility as well, so certainly it’s a good opportunity to make sure our council and their board understand what the common concerns are.”
City council invited residents, businesses and local groups to share their concerns about proposed electricity rate increases at a special public meeting Jan. 7, but no one from the school district attended.
Roller Routley said that session fell between board meetings and training for new trustees, and “did not allow us to come together to inform the board of what was going on, so we were not prepared to go.”
