simon
On Tuesday, August 26, 2003, at 05:14 PM, Dan Lanciani wrote:
|The electric co is offering flat rate plans now too
|They update them every three months to reflect your last 3 months of usage
For that matter (and getting way off topic) flat-rate water isn't all that
uncommon either. Until a few years ago our city water was mostly flat-rate
based on number of fixtures. Then the city started sending out the kinds of
comparisons mentioned previously showing how much you could save by switching
voluntarily to a meter. Once enough suck^H^H^H^Hearly adopters had converted
the city decided that it really wasn't fair for the rest of us to have a flat
rate while the metered folks were paying their fair share, so they made the
meter mandatory. As soon as most of the city was metered they jacked up the
rates so pretty much everyone was paying more than they had under the flat-rate
system. The exception was people who really used very little water either
because of their life style or because they were there only for one season of
the year. But it really wasn't fair for some people to pay so little and still
have the benefit of all that great city infrastructure, so the city added a
minimum billing amount comparable to the old flat rate--except it covered only
the first 2000 gallons per billing interval (where a billing interval is defined
by when the city decides to read the meters, approximately every three months).
Now in effect we have a flat-rate system with a penalty for using more than a
nominal amount of water. Of course, the idea all along was (retroactively) to
encourage water conservation and had nothing to do with increasing the city's
income...
Dan Lanciani [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
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