Local pastor questions REB billing procedure

When Cedars Church pastor Tanner Hall opened the church’s December utility bill, he did a double take.

The $1,162 bill, with $1,064 for December electricity kilowatt hours, had to be a mistake, Hall thought, so he immediately contacted Russellville Utilities to request a check on the church’s meter.

“Our power bill for December-January was right at $1,200. It’s never been that high,” Hall said. “I went down and asked for someone to come check the meter and see if something was not right.

“I also asked why we were being assessed a multiplier of 20 times what our kilowatt hour usage was. Our read was 386KW hours. Then they multiplied it by 20, and charged us for 7,720KW hours of power,” Hall added.

Compounding Hall’s frustration was the fact that Cedars Church was closed from December 21, 2025 through January 5, 2026, for a Sabbath break, two weeks inside the billing window of the $1,162 invoice.

“Other than our New Year’s Eve service everything was off in the building but we were still charged for hours we weren’t even here to use,” Hall said.

In Alabama, businesses often are charged a multiplier, or higher rate structure, on the electricity they use because businesses generally use significantly more power, so the ‘multiplier’ is a way to offset the additional maintenance and infrastructure demands required to serve these accounts.

When Hall reviewed the church’s past utility bills, he realized the 20X multiplier of the church’s monthly meter readings was nothing new. It never came to his attention because Cedars Church had never incurred an electric bill as high as its December 2025 bill.

In the following days, Hall spoke with three different Russellville Electric Board employees and an employee of the Tennessee Valley Authority who came to check the meter at REB’s request on January 30th.

Rather than receiving the answers he sought, Hall said he was left more confused by ‘inconsistent information’ from those he spoke with.

Included among the REB employees Hall spoke with was REB General Manager Derrick Moore.

Moore said he explained to Hall that 20X ‘multiplier’ was not a surcharge like ones assessed by some utilities on large industrial or business accounts.

Instead, it was based on the limitations of the meter used to determine kilowatt hours used.

Moore told the FFP that the registering capacity of some meters only represents a fraction of the actual load used by the customer, unlike single-phase meters commonly used for residential accounts.

On instrument-rated meters like the one at Cedars Church, the registered usage must be multiplied by the multiplier for that particular meter, 20/1 on the church meter, he explained.

With this particular meter, it only records a fraction of the actual electricity passing through the service, specifically 1/20th of total usage, according to information provided by REB.

So the difference between the current reading and the previous reading is multiplied by 20 to determine actual usage.

Hall said he was given the option of having a single-phase meter installed, but at the church’s expense. Hall said another REB employee said the meter on the Lawrence Street building is already a single-phase meter, so some confusion joined his frustration.

Converting to a household-type meter would require the church to incur the cost of installing a single-phase meter, Hall said he was told.

The pastor’s next question was whether all churches served by the Russellville Electric Board are also paying the 20X multiplier.

“I spoke with representatives of two different churches who said they are just paying for actual hours of usage, so why would it be different for some churches?,” Hall said. “We just want Cedars Church to be charged the same as other local churches that don’t have a multiplier.

“I’m not trying to get out of paying our power bill. I just want to pay for what we use and not what a multiplier shows. Derrick said he couldn’t do that because if he did it for one he’d have to do it for everyone,” Hall added.

TVA gives Local Power Companies who purchase its electricity broad discretion to set their own policies and procedures, with the primary rule that policies, regardless of what they are, must be applied consistently to all similarly-based customers.

Russellville Electric Board has four categories, or classes, of commercial accounts, based on the account’s electricity usage. Those accounts are categorized as Small Commercial (GSA-1), Large Commercial (GSA-2), Large Commercial (GSA-3) and Large Manufacturing (TDMSA).

The criteria for each account is available on the website www.russellvilleutilities.com, by clicking the ‘Electric Board’ option.

Almost two months after receiving the eye-popping December invoice, Hall still has more questions than answers about how Cedars Church is being billed, whether it’s consistent with billing policies for other churches, what can be done with the church meter to eliminate the multiplier and, finally, whether that has to be done at the church’s own expense.

Cedars Church received a $1,431 utility bill for February 2026, though, so these issues are not going away any time soon, nor is the financial strain the church faces in order to pay these significantly higher bills.