High usage for Bills Due February 15th

HIGH USAGE

Most of the customers of the City of San Augustine have received their bill via email or regular mail with the due date for February 15, 2024.

The majority of the bills have electrical usage higher than what most have experienced the past months as well as water usage if you left your water dripping during the freeze or experienced busted water pipes.

There were no changes in the rates since changes were made and adopted at the beginning of our budget beginning with the October 1 bill.

The annual factor for some of our accounts are the additional days to this billing due to read dates being pushed up in December and back to normal in January in order for our employees to enjoy the holidays with family and friends and in order to have billing out by the end of the month. If you account number starts with  a 1 - 6 there will be between 7 to 10 additional days and if your account number starts with a 7 - 8 some days were add, just not as many.  The reason for that is because our meters are not automated at this time, they are manually read by someone.  The reading cycle for the billing period in December always falls during the holidays.  

The other factor, and a major one, is the extremely cold freezing weather we experienced during January from the 15th - around the 17th or 18th.  With the temperature drop even of if you did not make a change to your unit and it was electrical, the temperatures outside would have caused your unit to operate for longer period of times.

With the combination of these two things the result was higher usage. 

Please feel free to call to inquire about your bill's usage and we will be more than happy to get your meter reread.

Management is looking into installing the AMI meters which will eliminate the added days of usage during this time of the year.

CITY OF SAN AUGUSTINE