Understanding your BPU bill

[Narrator] Understanding a bill that comes from this place can be a little overwhelming.

A photo of The United States Capitol.

[Narrator] But a bill that comes from this place? Not so much.

A photo of The Board of Public Utilities.

[Narrator] Especially after you watch this short video and learn everything there is to know about your monthly BPU bill.

An image of a BPU Bill appears, then each section that is talked about is highlighted.

[Narrator] Let’s start at the top. Right here, you’ll see your Bill Summary. This is the total for your BPU and Wyandotte County Unified Government, or UG, charges, plus tax.

Upper right hand corner of the bill is shown.

[Narrator] Why two amounts? Well, in a lot of cities and towns, you’d get three separate bills. One for water, one for electric, and one for trash removal.

An image of a faucet, electrical outlet and trash can appears.

[Narrator] In Wyandotte County, we make it easy. One bill covers all three.

Now…if you look at the left part of your bill, you’ll see all three charges broken down.

Upper left hand corner of the bill is shown.

[Narrator] First, there are the charges from BPU for your electricity and water, with the total right here.

Next, you see the Unified Government of Wyandotte County, Kansas City, KS, charges. UG, for short. Notice this Storm Water Management fee? That’s part of a federal order for the county to have a storm water management plan in place.

This fee is collected through the BPU billing process, then remitted back to the UG.

Next comes the PILOT charge. PILOT stands for Payment In Lieu Of Taxes, and a city ordinance requires BPU to pay a portion of its revenue to the UG to fund city operations.

Then comes the monthly charge for trash removal. Simple enough. And here, the last UG charge is Water Pollution Abatement. This is a sewage fee collected by the UG.

Next come the applicable city, state and county taxes. All that give you your account balance.

But sometimes it’s nice to know more. So we provide detailed meter and service information.

Bottom portion of the bill is shown.

[Narrator] Here, you’ll see two charges we haven’t talked about, but have already been figured into your account balance.

And this ERC, or Energy Rate Component represents the utility’s cost of fuel used to generate electricity and the cost of power that must be purchased on the open market. The ERC changes every three months, and is based on the actual fuel and purchased power costs that BPU pays.

Environmental Surcharge offsets new capital improvements resulting from federal, state, or local environmental regulations. This ESC charge will only be used to recover BPU expenditures for environmental projects.

Here (just below the ESC charges) are the electric customer and water customer access charges. These charges provide for the recovery of costs incurred in providing service to customers. It also represents a portion of the cost of system access and customer service, including the cost of meter reading, bill calculation, postage and the expenses associated with the basic plant investment at each service location, such as meters, transformers, service lines, etc.

There you have it. A complete explanation of your BPU bill. Next step? Try lowering your bill when you try all the energy and water saving videos at BPU.com, under the ‘For Home’ tab.

The website appears and the curser hovers over the FOR HOME tab and then hovers over ‘Energy Saving Tips’ in the menu, then the video tip page appears. The last shot shows the BPU logo.