Boerne could see rate increase for gas fees

JEFF B. FLINN Managing Editor
Today, 06:00 AM

Biggest costs pushed to medium, large users

Some Boerne gas customers could see their monthly bills increase by August as the city creates a tiered-rate structure to help raise $9.3 million over five years to pay for infrastructure improvements.

Sarah Buckelew, city finance director, told City Council the proposed rate structure relies on a three-part system separating small, medium and large users among residential and commercial accounts.

The city has assigned 2,603 of its lesser users into the “small residential” category. “They are the ones that would see the least impact on the new rate structure,” Buckelew said.

These smaller- capacity users are “not the ones that are driving the demand for the increase, but they are paying the higher bills,” she told the council.

What the city rate structure plan seeks to do, Buckelew added, “is create those incremental tiers that (push) the cost of this infrastructure more to the medium and larger users.”

With any growing utility, there’s a need to continually upgrade the operational support” while continuing to invest in the aging infrastructure already in place, she said.

“Over the next five years, our gas utility capital improvement plan has about $9.3 million in infrastructure needs” to handle those capacity improvements and pressure modernization.

Here is a breakdown of the three-tiered rate system:

“Our new rates would need to be able to support that new debt service for that infrastructure.”

— Sarah Buckelew, city finance director

• Small – The city’s 2,603 smaller residential users’ current bills average about $53.16, a rate that would increase $9.04 to an average of $62.20.

• Medium — The 1,164 medium residential customers average about $46.89 per month. They would see an increase to $63.76, a jump of $16.87

• Large –– The 11 largest residential users currently paying about $51.90 would now pay $69.71, a jump of $17.81 a month.

“The goal is to issue debt for a portion of it, so our new rates would need to be able to support that new debt service for that infrastructure,” Buckelew said.

New applied technology — specifically, tankless water heaters – have fueled the increase, she said.

“They were developed to be more efficient. But they require an immediate burst of energy to give you that hot water on demand,” she said. “When you have bubbles of customers that are all wanting to take their hot showers at the same time with tankless water heaters, what that creates is a system capacity issue during that peak hour.”