Advertisement

Wyandotte County’s utility tax is double the national average. Residents aren’t happy

Wyandotte County commissioners considered ways to provide relief to residents at a Thursday night public meeting, after many expressed that they were struggling to pay a controversial fee placed on their utility bills.

The commissioners said they would look into reducing the fee for residents or eliminating it altogether after many were frustrated over having to pay an added tax to the Unified Government of Wyandotte County on top of every electricity and water bill managed by the Board of Public Utilities.

The PILOT fee, which stands for payment in lieu of taxes, helps the Unified Government manage revenue losses from property taxes that are not collected from the BPU, since they are tax exempt. The money is used to help fund city operations. Residents unable to pay the bill, including the PILOT fee, risk being disconnected from the public utility.

As it stands, the tax the Unified Government adds on to every Board of Public Utilities bill is far higher than comparable utility company fees across the country. Whereas comparable fees tax around 5.5% on average, Wyandotte County residents are taxed at 11.9%, according to the American Public Power Association.

The tax has been a major complaint among residents for months, with many arguing the fees are not affordable to the average tax payer.

Louise Lynch, who co-founded the Community Conscience Action Network and also spoke at the meeting, called for the fee to be eliminated entirely.

“To continue, month after month, begging BPU for help is ridiculous… I came in September to speak about this issue,” she said. “We need to get rid of it totally. We cannot afford it.”

Lynch has worked alongside Ty Gorman, a spokesman for the Kansas Chapter of the Sierra Club, which is a grassroots organization advocating for environmental policy, to rally residents in favor of eliminating the tax.

“They have hundreds of dollars in fees that are unrelated to utility costs and they basically cut people off for not being able to pay them,” Gorman said following a December BPU meeting, where he and other residents prompted the utility to advocate for changing the tax.

An amendment to the Unified Government charter ordinances that would split the fee into different rates for residents and commercial businesses was proposed, but quickly tabled so that further research could be done on how to provide tax relief to the people most in need.

A committee led by District 1 Commissioner Melissa Bynum plans on presenting the Unified Government in March with options on how to break down the fee and what it would cost the government to reduce the tax.

“Based on the data alone you all need to be warned how hard this will be to bring PILOT relief,” Bynum said in the meeting.

She explained that even a 1% reduction in the fee could cost the government over $1 million.

Bynum said her committee was looking for ways to reduce the tax for people within a certain income bracket, age, or race, in an effort to provide the most relief to the people disproportionately struggling to pay the fee.

Less than a quarter of the Unified Government’s revenue comes from the PILOT fee and a majority of the accounts paying the tax are residential.

District 7 Commissioner Chuck Stites welcomed the idea of removing the tax, but like the majority of commissioners, appeared confused over how the fee got so high.

“Some time ago it was raised with the expectation that it would be reduced. Do we have any information as to why?” Stites said to Board of Public Utilities General Manager Bill Johnson during the meeting.

Johnson explained that due to falling revenue and rising expenses in 2009, the Unified Government and Board of Public Utilities agreed to raise the PILOT fee from 9.9% to 13.8%, and since then it has dropped to the current rate.

He could not remember what the Unified Government had agreed to do to lower the rate further.

“These are tax dollars that are levied against utility revenue and the people in this room are the ones who are paying for it,” he said.