To the Editor:
In the Feb. 20 edition of the Review, Darryl McDonald wrote that Fortis seems confused as to what their rates are, but with no disrespect intended, I must disagree with him, an I will explain.
I have a copy of a full page ad from the Feb. 13 edition of the Review in which Fortis explains the residential conservation rate and it clearly states that the tier one rate is 9.09 cents and the two tier rate is 13.54 cents. It states on my latest Fortis bill they were granted an interim rate increase of 3.3 per cent effective Jan. 1 If you take the old tier one rate of 0,08803 cents, plus the 3.3 per cent increase, the new tier one rate should be 0.09093, or 9.09 cents, which is what the ad states, but if you take the old tier two rate of 0.12952 plus 3.3 per cent, it should be 0.13379, or 13.38 cents, not 13.54 cents.
My most recent bill for the period up to Jan. 16 shows the amount for tier two at the old rate, and the interim rate increase amount, which is actually 4.56 per cent instead of the 3.3 per cent it should be.
This works out to an overcharge of $2.14 on my bill.
Two dollars and fourteen cents is not a large amount, but over a year this will add up and as it would appear that they are overcharging every customer by 1.3 per cent this will be a very large amount of money that Fortis should not be getting.
I phoned Fortis this morning (Monday, Feb.24) to get an explanation. They told me that tier one is a 3.3 per cent increaseand tier two is acutally closer to 4.6 per cent, but it seems they conveniently neglected to inform us of this increase. The agent I spoke with tried to explain the higher increase on tier two as necessary because on tier two as necessary because they don’t know how many customers will try to conserve and so they need to have a bigger increase on tier two to maintain the same income.
Does that make any sense to you?
The whole idea of the conservation rate was to reduce electricity usage, but it seems that if we do conserve, they will just increase the rate. It appears that those of us that use electricity to heat our homes will be further subsidizing everyone who heats with gas.
I believe that Fortis knows exactly what its rates are and they made a deliberate decision to not tell us about the higher tier two increase, knowing we would not be happy and they were hoping that we wouldn’t notice. A Fortis manager is supposed to be calling me to try to explain the rationale of this higher increase, but as of Monday afternoon I have not received his call.
Bill Copeland, Cawston
