Solar panel arrays can be seen alongside electric substation equipment and wastewater treatment plant tanks at Lansdale Borough’s electric and public works headquarters on Ninth Street. (Photo courtesy of Lansdale Borough)
May electric bills will be first using new rate, say staff
A long-discussed increase in Lansdale’s electric rates is now official.
Council members voted unanimously on Wednesday night to approve a five percent rate hike, the town’s first in just over a decade.
“What we’ll all be seeing is: in our May electric bill, we’ll see a five percent increase,” said borough Manager John Ernst.
Borough staff have made the case for the electric rate hike to cover increased electric capacity and transmission costs hitting customers nationwide, plus a need to repair and replace infrastructure and equipment amid supply chain and inflation problems, and to cover a $4.5 million transfer from electric to the general fund in the 2025 borough budget.
The increase would be the first time the town has raised its electric rate since late 2014 for 2015, when that council increased tax, sewer and electric rates all at once, and comes on the heels of sewer rate hikes approved in 2023 and a real estate tax rate hike for 2025, the first such increase since 2022 for ’23. Details of the rate increase were included in council’s meeting materials packet, and electric Superintendent Andy Krauss said Wednesday that the rate hike will help fund electric hardware upgrades like a new transformer currently being installed at the department’s Ninth Street complex.
Solar panels can be seen atop Lansdale Borough’s municipal building at Vine Street and Railroad Avenue. (Photo courtesy of Lansdale Borough)“There’s a total of seven, and this one is from the ’70s. It was manufactured in ’78, so it’s the newest of the old ones,” Krauss said.
Last year the borough consolidated their electric billing cycles from a series of nine different due dates, which Ernst said was originally designed around how many old-style meters staff could read and process in a certain day, to one electric billing date per month for the entire town. Those bills will likely cover customers’ electric usage from April 19 to May 19 and will be the first to reflect the higher rates, per Krauss, who said he’s heard minimal feedback from residents about the rate hike.
“You read a little chatter online, but we’re happy to talk to anybody about it,” Krauss said.
Council also unanimously approved a new electric ordinance, which is meant to update and replace outdated language in earlier versions already on the books; the 40-page ordinance is also included in council’s meeting materials packet. The only comments on that update came from resident Dominic Frascella, who asked about provisions in the code that set limits on the voltage of appliances in certain situations.
“There’s a weird limit on electric motors: saying that anything above one-half horsepower can’t be 120 volts? Which seemed a little arbitrary? My blender is two horsepower,” Frascella said.
“I think we have a couple of people who can address your blender,” council President Mary Fuller replied, and electric committee chairman Andrew Carroll said that section of the code only applied to houses wired for a certain voltage, and Krauss said only two such houses exist in town.
“If you’d like to find out if you are one, Andy can run your address, but it’s not likely. It’s a caveat that has to be in there because those two homes exist,” Carroll said.
Lansdale’s borough council next meets at 8:30 p.m. on May 7 and the electric committee next meets at 7:30 p.m. that night, both at the borough municipal bluding,1 Vine Street. For more information visit www.Lansdale.org.
This article appears courtesy of a content share agreement between North Penn Now and The Reporter. To read more stories like this, visit https://www.thereporteronline.com
