Billing Structure

"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."

Billing Classes

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.

Part I: (Basic Service Charge)

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. At issue is the nature of "Delivery based" billing, where a Service Area is billed based on the stake-out requests they actually receive. Dig|Safely. New York uses somewhat expensive software and mapping to screen these stake-outs, so when the people who benefit from this screening do not get a copy of the stake-out - they do not get billed for the call, meaning they do not pay for the system they are using to screen the calls.

If we contrast that with a Service Area that does not utilize any screening whatsoever - they receive every stake-out request for a given place, period. These people don't need us to have maps, and they don't need us to have fancy software; they get every stake-out we take. The software and mapping costs are of no benefit to them, yet they are the ones who pay for it with delivery-based billing. Meanwhile, a Service Area using complex polygons (etc.) will benefit greatly from these things, and not pay a dime towards it because they never get any tickets.

Clearly, this is backwards. The Basic Service Charge is an attempt to rebalance the operational costs between those who use the screening features and those who do not.

Selection Options

Place: This selection option is for Members who choose to be notified for all calls in a place or a variation called Grid/Place.
Grid: This selection option is for Members who choose to be notified by grided regions.
Polygon: This selection option is for Members who choose to be notified by arbitrary polygonal regions.
Note: Calculation of amounts in this part is based on the preceding year’s volume. This amount is billed monthly.

Part II: (Notice Delivery Charge)

A charge for each excavation notice delivered. This charge will vary upon the method of delivery, Voice, Fax, ASCII and Email in order of most expensive to least expensive delivery method. Copy stations are also available at an additional charge.

1200 Fax Limit

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 / xml) or paying a per-delivery surcharge on each subsequent delivery.

Billing intervals

Suggested billing intervals based on expected annual billing amounts:

$0 to $200 billed once a year
$201 to $400 billed twice a year
$401 to $600 billed quarterly
Greater than $600 billed monthly

If you have any questions concerning our billing structure, please call Gwen Landry, our Administrative Bookkeeper at 315-437-7394. You may also email Gwen at . Please be sure to include your company name and contact information.