MARSHFIELD, Wis. (WDLB) — Marshfield’s municipal utility is giving over two-million dollars back to the city.
City aldermen and Mayor Chris Meyer accepted a check at last night’s meeting of the Common Council from Marshfield Utilities. Because it’s a publicly-owned utility, John Maggitti who chairs the city’s Utility Commission, says it’s a great value for customers and rate payers in the service area. “The average residential rate on an annual basis is about $341 dollars less than is paid by someone just a mile and a half to our east for the exact same quality of service for the exact same amount of electricity. When you multiply that by the nearly 14,000 electric meters in the service territory, you’re looking at four-point-seven million dollars that is not leaving our community.”
Maggitti says all of that money is staying in our community. Utility Commission Treasurer Mike Eberl said this year’s payment in lieu of taxes is just over one-point-eight million dollars. “If we contrast that with a privately owned utility serving Marshfield instead of the municipal, that number to the city would be substantially less because whereas you get the whole thing from a municipal, in a privately owned situation, that money would all go to the state, and the state would share it with the other taxing entities.”
Meanwhile, this year’s dividend payment to the city is 216-thousand dollars, which will go to the city’s Economic Development Board. Since 1996, the utility has returned over four-million dollars to the city in the form of dividend payments. Eberl says Marshfield Utilities currently has assets totaling 120-million dollars. “With the 48-million dollars in liability subtracted, that’s a net asset value that the city owns of 74-million dollars. That increased by almost four million dollars last year alone, and continues to go up as we invest in infrastructure.”
Eberl says the city has about 53 million invested in electric service infrastructure, and approximately 20 million dollars in water investments, and one million in the communications utility. Marshfield Utilities serves Marshfield, the village of Hewitt and 120 square miles around the city. by Mike Warren, WDLB
