Town Hall meeting covers variety of topics

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Bryan Franks
  • 14th Flying Training Wing Public Affairs
COLUMBUS AIR FORCE BASE, Miss. --  Columbus Air Force Base senior leaders, along with Hunt Housing hosted a town hall meeting at the Columbus Club Aug. 13 to discuss issues related to dental insurance, medical appointments and on-base housing rent, utility allowance and Military Munitions Response Program updates.

All active duty military dependents with dental insurance coverage were switched to MetLife dental May 1, 2012. Before making dental appointments families should check the MetLife providers list to ensure their provider accepts MetLife insurance. To check the MetLife provider list families can go online to https://metlocator.metlife.com, call (855) 638-8371 or go to the TRICARE office at the lobby of the 14th Medical Group's Koritz Clinic.

The 14th MDG is changing the way they make appointments for patients that will provide shorter wait times and higher quality of service. To do this, the medical clinic will tailor each medical appointment to fit the need of the patient and provide the medical care team enough time to work with each patient on their particular issue based on its complexity. For patients the process will be seamless.

Hunt Military Communities presented their new program to provide housing residence greater flexibility for their rent payments. Nearly everyone now is paying rent to Hunt at the beginning of the month. Now residents will have the opportunity to change their monthly rental payment to the end of the month.

This payment change to the end of the month will benefit new residents first moving in or for residents who will be affected by increases in their BAH at the beginning of each year. For current residents wishing to take advantage of payment in arrears, Hunt will be sending notification out notifying you of this new option and you can go in and sign a new lease with Hunt. Housing residents who wish to continue paying their rent in advance can choose to do so as well.

The Resident Energy Conservation program kicks off as family housing utility billing is scheduled to go live beginning with the Sept. 4 to Oct. 4 usages, with the first live bills going out in late October. To streamline the billing process for housing residents, Hunt contracted Minol to act as a third party vendor to merge the two bills and facilitate both the mock billing and live billing process. One highlight of this topic centers around the ability to "opt in or out" of the rebate program through the Minol website allowing residents to save their rebates in case of spikes in usage during winter or summer months. By saving the rebates, anytime residents owe money, Minol would deduct it from the rebates residents accumulated rather than paying a bill.

All residents will have a $50 trigger each month. The trigger would go both ways; if they saved more than $50 in utilities they would receive a rebate check if they owed more than $50 on top of their utility allowance they would have to pay.

The utility allowance is calculated annually using current and historic usages for occupied base homes with similar floor plans. Once that number is calculated an additional 10 percent is added to the allowance. The number of people living in a home is not factored because the floor plan of the home has a much larger impact than whether one person or four people reside in the home for example it takes the same amount of energy to heat or cool the home.

The discussion then moved on to housing where the Military Munitions Response Program update was presented. Currently in Magnolia Village nine homes had their soil removed and replace with five in progress and four more scheduled. In State Village two houses have been completed and two are still scheduled for top soil replacement. Affected housing residents have already been informed by base Environmental personnel if they are scheduled for top soil removal.

A copy of the slides from the Town Hall meeting is available on the CAFB Facebook site and at www.columbus.af.mil. DVDs of the live Town Hall presentation and added energy saving tips are available at the Hunt Military Communities office.