Energy drain: Overbilling by utilities siphons education funds

Utility companies are inaccurately billing public schools by hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — taxpayer money that likely would be lost if schools didn't hunt it down.

Granite District pinpoints about $200,000 in billing inaccuracies every year, and once got about $650,000 back, the district's Energy Management coordinator Bill McLeod said.

Davis District reports it has recovered more than $200,000 due to billing inaccuracies over the course of five years.

Alpine School District recovered nearly $35,000 from utilities in the past year.

Given the largest district has a half-billion-dollar budget, those amounts are relatively tiny. And utility numbers show their billing is right almost all of the time.

But in a state that spends less per student than any other, every tax dollar counts. State data show $200,000 recovered from utilities could teach 43 children for a year or fund a year's pay and benefits for two teachers and one principal or buy 85,000 school lunches.

A few district energy bosses think more money is hiding out there. They have two or three years to find it before it's lost — or becomes harder to get back, according to state administrative code.

Some officials, however, wonder if all school districts have the time or skills to locate errors, which can be like looking for a grave with no tombstone.

Others question why government-funded public schools have to monitor government-regulated utilities.

"To be honest, I am really frustrated because we're all just scrimping," said Sarah Meier, president of the Granite Board of Education, which has struggled with budget cuts in recent years. "Utility companies — who oversees (them)? Why should we be overseeing and paying tax dollars to oversee?"

The Deseret Morning News contacted eight school districts — Alpine, Cache, Davis, Granite, Jordan, Murray, Washington, Weber — plus the University of Utah, Utah Valley State College, and the Utah Department of Corrections about their energy costs.

The school districts have stories to tell: Water companies double-billing both a school and the LDS Church for seminary water use; meters going unread for months; being taxed when they shouldn't have been.

But those stories apparently aren't shared with utility regulators.

The Division of Public Utilities, which mediates complaints, hasn't heard anything. Neither has residential customer advocate Utah Committee of Consumer Services, nor the regulatory Public Service Commission.

"I am, in the British vernacular, God-smacked," committee director Roger Ball responded when told of the inaccuracies.