WINTER PARK, Fla. \u2014 Winter Park residents will see their electric bills go up starting next month. City leaders met Wednesday evening and finalized the city\u2019s budget for the next fiscal year.<\/p>\n
It includes a utility rate hike and a big boost in public safety pension spending.<\/p>\n
Winter Park has its own electric utility, so residents pay their electric bills to the city. Leaders voted Wednesday to increase electric bills 7.7 percent. Some residents say it\u2019s another bill going up while so many other things are already more expensive these days.<\/p>\n
The electric meters have been running hard in Winter Park with another hot summer. City leaders say they need to push power bills up to invest in electric utility infrastructure during the new fiscal year.<\/p>\n
Rosie Fuentes and Steve Cruz have lived in Winter Park for three years on a tight budget.<\/p>\n
Cruz says, “It\u2019s just going to add to everybody\u2019s burden. Especially our senior citizens. Everything going up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Under the approved rate increase, someone paying $300 per month for electricity in Winter Park could see a $23 per month increase, or about $276 per year if their usage were the same each month.<\/p>\n
City Commissioner Kris Cruzada says the rate increase will help pay to continue undergrounding cables, maintain substations, improve transformers and replace meters.<\/p>\n
“It’s an enterprise system where all our costs and expenses and revenue have to be maintained within that system,” Cruzada said. “So as energy goes up, we may need to raise our rates.”<\/p>\n
The adopted spending plan will also increase residents\u2019 water and waste water bill by 4.46 percent. The city\u2019s approved general fund budget will increase by $4.8 million compared to this year, for a total general fund of $94.6 million.<\/p>\n
City Commissioners also approved a $1.2 million increase in funding for the police and fire pension fund. That\u2019s a 26 percent increase from this year. City leaders also approved funds to resurface 7.5 lane miles of roads.<\/p>\n
Cruz said that with so many costly increases, like groceries, gas and now the electric bill, they will cut corners to make ends meet in the coming months.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo Christmas decorations for one thing, and we\u2019re gonna have to tolerate the warm weather a little more,” he said.<\/p>\n
City leaders also discussed the possible impacts of Amendment 3. They say if the property tax relief plan passes this November, the city’s tax property revenues could go down by $2.7 million for fiscal 2027 to 2028.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WINTER PARK, Fla. \u2014 Winter Park residents will see their electric bills go up starting next month. City…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":408769,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[3140,1337,115,139,141,140,99,1911,135,835],"class_list":["post-408768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-app-local-state-politics","tag-keith-landry","tag-news","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-politics","tag-polk-county","tag-tampa","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/408769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}