BEL has accepted the PUC's recommendation of a 6% cut in electricity rates.
With state control of the power company, that should have been pretty much automatic, but 10 days ago BEL had all of us going, "HMMM" after the company said it would "revisit" the PUC's initial decision.
Well, it seems BEL has come around, and today your power provider sent out a release saying "that it will not be filing any objections to the Initial Decision."
But, at the same time, the power company says it will be asking Government to reduce its business tax. That tax was increased from 1.75% to 6.5% in 2010 when the company was owned by Fortis.
BEL says that if it gets this tax reduction and enacts cost saving measures, only then can it support the 6% rate cut proposed by the PUC.
In its statement today, BEL also pointed out that the proposed rate cut will only be sustainable if the actual cost of power remains at the projected level or lower - that we note has a lot to do with the world price of oil.
So, without any objection from BEL and none apparently coming from 10% of the utility's users, the new rate should go into effect on February first, 2012.
Residential customers will see a decrease of three cents per kilowatt hour while social rate customers will see a decrease from 26 to 24 cents per kilowatt hour.
And in a related correction to a story we ran last night about the initial decision on lower water rates - we said 10% of shareholders can object to the new rates - we should have said, 10% of the end users of the utility can collectively object.
