BRYAN, Texas — Bryan Texas Utilities is responding after organizers stood in front of their offices to protest fees and practices during this pandemic.
For the utility company, their restarted collections are not about greed.
BTU knows about the organizers who are protesting their fees, but said they’ve done what they can to help their customers during the pandemic, stopping disconnections for as long as they could.
“In fact, we’ve delayed them a month beyond when we said we would.//and so we haven’t been doing any disconnections or even doing late fees for 4 months,” said Ken Dupre, an accounts manager at BTU.
They started with their regular collections of those fees on Monday. Right now, they have about 2,000 that are 30 days or past due.
Dupre said, “those are the ones we are encouraging to contact us, as we can work out a payment plan or we can provide you with information on organizations who are willing to help. We can keep people from being cut off pretty easily.”
Just this week, organizers of Monday's protests formed a GoFundMe to help those who are struggling with paying utilities in Bryan-College Station.
A common sentiment heard at the protest alluded to a belief that BTU has a lot of money, why do they have to do this now in the middle of summer?
To that, Dupre said, "we don’t have a whole lot of money. Essentially, we’re a non profit. We’re owned by the city of Bryan and the citizens of Bryan. When we set our budget that’s how our rates are done. So to say that we have a ton of money, that’s really not the case.”
BTU also says if their customers don’t pay their electric bill and they let it slide, others would have to pick up the slack.
“So it’s really not fair if we turn our head away because that just puts everything back onto all of the other citizens and customers and rate payers,”
Dupre said.
Utilities are regulated by Texas code anyway and when it comes to eliminating disconnection and reconnection fees, BTU says those total to $25.
“That again, covers the cost of the service. We send out three different letters. We have customer service that are simply there just to handle the disconnect and reconnect functions, he said, "our board considered what is happening in the community and that’s why we went for four months without doing this, but Texas is trying to get back to business as usual and this is business as usual.”