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| Members | Service Areas | Destinations | Response Issues | Etc. |
"Each member shall pay such charges or fees in effect for its class of membership for Basic Services as shall be determined and/or otherwise fixed by the Board of Directors or pursuant to the General Operating Procedures and Responsibilities of the Corporation. Additionally, every member shall pay such charges or fees in effect for Extra Services, if any, as shall be determined and/or fixed by the Board of Directors or pursuant to the General Operating Procedures and Responsibilities of the Corporation."
Dig|Safely. New York, as the result of the requirement for Manditory Membership, has two classes of billing.
Exempt Participating Members are Municipals (county and below), Water with fewer than 4000 subscribers, and Authorities. Exempt Participating Members will not be billed for the core services provided by Dig|Safely. New York. Core service consists of one free service area and one free delivery of any stake-out requests for that service area. The destination of this delivery can change throughout the day, but additional deliveries (copies) of a given stake-out are billable. Core service does not include Voice notification (a human physically dispatching the stake-out via phone call). Finally, Exempt Participating Members are not exempt from the "1200 Fax Surcharge" (described below). Any additional options are billed at a normal membership rate.
Participating Members are everyone else.
Invoices are generated at the start of each month. However, members with smaller call volumes will find it tedious (at best) to receive an invoice for a dollar. As such, billing intervals are possible.
Suggested billing intervals are based on expected yearly billing estimates.
If you have any questions concerning our billing structure, please call Nicole Smalarz, our Administrative Bookkeeper at 315-437-7394. You may also email Nicole at . Please be sure to include your company name and contact information.
The Billing Strategy consists of three parts, in an effort to distribute operational costs in a way that accurately represents the processes taking place.
The cost of processing a call in a given place.
A Basic Service Charge is paid for each notice created within the legally incorporated boundaries of each place covered by a Service Area. The BSC is based on the unscreened call volume of a given place, to in-effect mirror the actual workload performed by the Call Center on the Service Area's behalf. The specific charge-per-notice is based on the type of screening used by the service area - place, grid, or polygon.
The Basic Service Charge is intended to share the cost of processing a stake-out request with the Service Areas who do not receive them, as well as distribute the promotion and educational costs in an area.
At issue is the nature of "Delivery based" billing, where a Service Area is billed based on the actual reception of a stake-out request. In the old days, everyone in a given place got every ticket in that place, so it all worked out.
These days, Dig|Safely. New York uses somewhat expensive software and mapping to screen the stake-out requests we take, and it minimizes the number of utilities that are notified in a given place. As a result, delivery-based billing is no longer an accurate means of distributing costs.
The challenge is that when a screened utility does not get a copy of the stake-out, it therefore does not get billed for the call - which means it does not pay for the system it just used to screen that call.
If we contrast that with a Service Area that does not utilize any screening whatsoever - it receives every stake-out request for a given place, period. This utility does not need us to have maps, and it does not need us to have fancy software - and yet it gets every stake-out we take. The software and mapping could pretty much be replaced with a post-it note stuck to our desk that says to include them on the ticket. These software and mapping costs are clearly of no benefit to them, yet they are the ones who pay for it with delivery-based billing, since they get every ticket. Meanwhile, a Service Area using complex screening will never pay a dime towards they system because they rarely get anything.
The Basic Service Charge is an attempt to rebalance the operational costs between those who use the screening features and those who do not.
The cost of including a service area on a location request.
Specifically, this charge seperates the above overhead from the actual delivery of a ticket. Service areas that receive multiple copies of a ticket (via several destinations or "copy stations") will enjoy a more accurate and simplified cost structure as a result of this overhead separation. Traditional "single copy" service areas will not be impacted by this split.
There are no rate selections for this section.
A charge for each excavation notice that is delivered, based on the method of delivery.
Note that the entire concept of a "Copy Station" has been deprecated with the introduction of the Affected Service Area Charge.
Dig|Safely. New York offers a variety of delivery methods. Obviously, some are better than others in specific cases. Faxing, for example, is wonderful because it is a widely available technology. Faxing is likewise horrible if any significant volume is involved... from a transmission perspective, it is orders of magnitude more expensive than the other options available. Because of this, Dig|Safely. New York limits fax-based destinations to a maximum of 1200 faxes per year. If a destination exceeds this quantity, they have the option of changing to a higher-performance delivery method (modem / email / soap) or paying a per-delivery surcharge on each subsequent delivery.
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