JOHNSON CITY -- BrightRidge continues to make two forms of easy payment services available for residential customers, with sign-up required by the end of May to qualify.

“We fully understand that the peaky nature of Northeast Tennessee weather makes for equally peaky, and painful, power bills when super-hot days in summer or super-cold days in winter arrive,” BrightRidge CEO Jeff Dykes said. “With that in mind, our customer support offers two flexible payment plans that our customers on fixed budgets might want to consider.”

Rolling Budget Billing is a levelized monthly payment plan with payments that vary by only a few dollars each month. Customers pay for what they use but average the payments over time. There is no settlement unless the customer closes the account or transfers their service to another location.

Fixed Budget Billing is a monthly payment plan that settles every 12 months in June or July. Customers have the ease of knowing the exact amount they will be paying each month. At settlement time, customers will either owe a balance or receive a credit depending on the actual bill amount over 12 months.

“As a public power provider, we recognize our responsibility to the citizens we serve,” Dykes said. “We reinvest millions annually into our distribution system to ensure reliability, provide $5.4 million in payments in lieu of taxes back to local governments in the service area, and we make by far more payment arrangements for our customers than the next closest utility we are aware of.

“These are some of the benefits of public power, a duty to serve and a duty to help our customers learn to use the product, electricity, more efficiently, and to help those that we can in a time of need.”

For more information on how budget billing could help lessen the home budget impact from peak summer and winter bills, please visit http://www.jcpb.com/yourHome/easyPay/budgetBilling.asp for an application or call 423-952- 5000 and select option 3 during business hours to speak to a representative about the program.