$1 fee to stay, mayor protests

Photo: Colin Dacre

The one dollar fee associated with paper billing for City of Penticton utilities is here to stay, despite the objections of the mayor.

Penticton city council voted 6-1 Tuesday to maintain the status quo and continue to charge a buck to mail out paper bills to ratepayers.

Council heard it costs just under $1.15 to prepare and mail a paper bill, meaning the city expects to recover about $140,000 of the total $161,000 spent on paper bills a year through the fee.

Revenue supervisor Amber Coates told council the expense isn’t going anywhere, and the funding will have to come from the taxpayers in some other form should the fee be scrapped. She noted just 37 formal complaints about the practice have been registered at city hall since it began in 2015.

Mayor John Vassilaki wasn't on board.

“I don’t like the idea of city council or any government nickel-and-diming their taxpayers to death,” he said. “I believe that has to stop and should have stopped a long time ago.”

He added the city’s electrical utility makes an “exorbitant” profit and subsidizes other parts of the municipal budget. The utility, indeed, pays a $3M dividend to the city’s general capital fund.

“I believe that because of those profits, that’s a cost of doing business and it should be paid out of profits for those utilities,” Vassilaki said.

The rest of council didn’t agree and said they found the fee reasonable to help offset the cost of billing.

“Democracy has taken place,” Vassilaki shrugged, after the motion to keep the fee in place passed 6-1.

City manager Peter Weeber said the matter was brought before council because it became a debated issue during October’s election.