RMLD Rates Increasing 6-8%

At the February 26th meeting, the Board of Commissioners, on the recommendation of the Citizens’ Advisory Board, voted 5-0 to accept the General Manager’s recommendation to replace the following MDPU rates effective for billings on or after April 1, 2025:

Residential rates will see a 6.3% increase, Residential Time of Use rates will see a 6.2% increase, Commercial will see a 7% increase, Industrial Time of Use will see a 7.9% increase, Municipal will see a 6.7% increase and Schools will see a 5.9% increase. Gregory Phipps, RMLD general manager on the rate increases:

This is this is a well-managed budget. I mean honestly and and our financials are well managed. There is upward pressure on costs, we just talked about those but our reliability is better than it’s ever been right. We are we are more compliant than we have ever been in terms of being ahead and we can decide to ratchet that back a million, a million two right there, in terms of ratcheting that back down if we so decide to do. There’s a bunch of levers that we can pull if we want to but we don’t need to pull them right now. The rates we’re in the 70 percentile, we’re not in the middle on residential and we’re in the bottom cortile on Commercial the C and I.

RMLD monthly bills with the increase are 40% below Eversource, National Grid and Unitil.

The complete meeting can be seen below but the discussion happens during the 1hr5min to 2hr11min marks.