Cost-of-Service

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Are Your Rates Fair, Equitable, and Defensible?

Those are the words you hear when your customers talk about what they want from their water or sewer rates.  Great words, but what do they mean?  Even though these words have different meaning for different people, StepWise helps cut through the chatter with objective approaches for quantifying what is equitable, what is fair, and what is defensible.  Our cost-of-service study approach sorts through your costs, maps them to the demands on your system, and then connects those demands to your customers’ usage patterns.  The end result:  a fact-based assessment of who should pay, what they should pay for, and how much.  With this kind of information in hand, you will be much better prepared to adopt rates that your customers will accept as both fair and equitable. bigstockphoto_Susan_B_Anthony_And_Kennedt_D_2827815

A StepWise cost-of-service study can help to address dissatisfaction with rates too.  In our experience, we have found that the further your rates depart from the cost-of-service results, the more likely you are to encounter customer resistance to rates, rate shock, and even litigation.  Without an objective cost-of-service analysis, it can be difficult to defend your current rates. StepWise can keep you clear of these pitfalls by giving you the right tools to keep your rates on a defensible track.