Rates

12/5/2011
Memo from Sam Carpenter, President, regarding Cost of Living Service Rate Adjustment

Over the years, we’ve made a cost-of-living adjustment each January in exact accordance with the previous year’s U.S. Department of Labor CPI inflationary index. Due to the state of the economy, we made no CPI  adjustment in 2010 or 2011, absorbing the inflationary loss of revenue over those two years. (The actual CPI increases per the U.S. Department of Labor were 2.7% for 2009, and 1.5% in 2010.) By far, Centratel’s largest cost of operation is staffing and we have increased wages each year per actual official cost-of-living increases. Beyond those costs, health insurance has skyrocketed while virtually all other operational costs continued to rise. Regarding 2011, as of October, 2011 has seen an accumulated CPI increase of 3.5%.  With the improving economy, we must now bring our service rates current with the past three years’ inflationary increases, instituting a 7.7% increase effective 1/1/2012. Thank you for your understanding.