Rhoda: Schools shouldn?t pay commercial utility rates

�Will back PTA's request for lower rates�

PHILIPSBURG--Education Minister Rhoda Arrindell says schools should not be charged the same utility rates as commercial enterprises.

She made the remarks in an e-mail response to questions posed by The Daily Herald on concerns raised by the Sr. Magda School Parent Teachers Association (PTA) that it was unfair for schools to be charged commercial utility rates as businesses, when they are in fact institutions providing education. The PTA had said that schools pay "outrageous" utility rates, three times more than residential clients, because of this.

Arrindell said the concerns had been forwarded to the responsible minister. "In my introductory meetings with individual school board members from other schools, the matter was raised and I have since forwarded these concerns to the responsible minister.

"Government is working to find a structural manner to address this issue to the benefit of our schools. Schools, of course, are generally not commercial operations. Usually, the school boards which run the schools are foundations. This means they are not profit organizations. They should not, consequently, be charged utility bills as if they were commercial enterprises."

She said she was "not aware" if the Sr. Magda PTA had already addressed its concerns directly with the utility company which charges the school such rates. "If this has been done, I will gladly back their request for lower rates. But again, as far as I know, it is the school board that takes care of such bills and I do not have any information about what the school board has done or not regarding this," she said.

The PTA had told this newspaper that it had made several futile attempts to raise the matter with past Energy Affairs Commissioners and the current government in the hope that the system could be changed for schools to be charged a residential rate instead and be able to pay less.

At Sr. Magda School, for example, the utility bills are so "sky high" that the school is forced to use the subsidy it receives from government to cover its utility costs.

Sr. Magda School is charged NAf. 21.74 per cubic metre of water, compared to a household tariff of NAf. 7.50 per cubic metre. "In a nutshell we pay three times ore than households when we are charged commercial tariffs, as are all schools," the PTA representative said.

"The school's entire subsidy is about equivalent to the GEBE bill of the school. The school is being treated as a hotel and this means that that money that is meant to buy school supplies goes to GEBE."

The PTA had sent letters to a former Energy Affairs Commissioner, but no response had been received. In 2009 representatives of all the catholic schools sent a joint letter to a former Energy Affairs Commissioner requesting a meeting to discuss this and other issues "with no success."

"We've sent letters to GEBE and to [Energy Affairs] commissioners for years, begging for meetings to discuss it, but we've not had any success," the PTA representative had said, adding that when one of the letters had been delivered to the office of "a commissioner responsible for the portfolio of GEBE, the staff member had said to put it in the commissioner's nonsense box."

Source: http://www.thedailyherald.com/islands/1-islands-news/14303-rhoda-schools-shouldnt-pay-commercial-utility-rates-.html

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