A Member Owned Recreational Park
An email, one of 3 has been sent to shareholders, the other two will be sent over the course of the next few days and are designed to explain a few fundamental changes that are being made to Hydro calculations that are displayed on the annual maintenance bills you all receive in January of every new camping season.
I will do my level best to explain this in simple terms so as not to overly complicate what is proposed.
I also want to make clear that this is a TRIAL to see if this proposal is more efficient than what we currently do.
The park as a whole uses around $110,000 of Hydro annually. Almost 80% of that is used by individual campsite owners. When the park sends out your Hydro bill it is based on your previous 3-year average use of hydro to generate a prediction of what you are likely to use in the coming year so the board can ensure that we have enough capital on hand to pay this bill across the camping season. So, we predict how much you are going to use and then we collect this in advance and use that to pay our entire hydro bill across the financial year. The small portion used to actually run the park is paid out of the operating budget.
In the past staff and a few volunteers have visited every campsite and taken a physical reading from the hydro meter attached to every trailer in the park of the actual Kilowatt hours of electricity that you have used. That reading is compared to the one taken 12 months previous and then its averaged across the last 3 years readings to generate your expected use in Kilowatt hours over the next year. You are charged 14.8 cents (in 2027) for every full Kilowatt hour of hydro that you have used across the previous season. Once this calculation has been made this is added to your annual Maintenance bill that is mailed in January 2027.
Collecting the data and then calculating 310 site hydro bills and then amalgamating that information into each maintenance letter has proven to be a very time-consuming affair. It involved 3-4 people working 8 hours a day each for an entire week to accomplish, just before Christmas. This is neither efficient use of our staff time nor fair to volunteers who do this work. It is also subject to errors in reading the meter, miscalculations and basic human errors.
The results were often misunderstood by shareholders that then required multiple emails and recalculations to verify that no errors have been made (there have been numerous errors in most years) that puts an unnecessary burden on our staff and particularly the treasurer and the assistant.
A new system that is more efficient and less burdensome has been proposed and adopted by the board of directors that will come into effect starting with the 2027 annual maintenance billing cycle and again this will be a TRIAL in 2027 to gauge efficiency before being adopted as a preferred method in future years. OR not depending on the results.
In the next email I will explain what the new method looks like and what it means for everyone’s bill in 2027. What happens if you use more or less hydro in 2027 and how that affects your hydro in 2028 with full examples for you to analyze.
So please watch for more emails on this subject over the next few days.