EDITOR’S NOTE: Read the consultant’s report recommending massive DWP
electricity rate hikes at OurLA.org.
You don’t
know nothing if you didn’t know this was coming: Massive DWP rate hikes.
How else
did you think they were going bail out the sinking ship of the city except by
socking it to you?
It’s all
been a setup, planned for a long time and now it’s being executed: 800 percent
increase in the “energy cost adjustment factor” pass-through on April 1, 20
percent increase in the next 12 months, 33 percent with last year included.
And from
there, you can be 100 percent certain your power rates will keep going up and
away, doubled and tripled.
You are
sitting in the DWP’s electric chair and they are about to pull the switch. I’ve
been telling you this was coming for months so don’t be shocked when your
electricity bill soars higher than your mortgage.
Don’t kid
yourselves: It’s the people who have mortgages that are paying the bulk of
these rate hikes.
They
jiggled the rate tiers to punish the 40 percent of residents who live in single
family homes while keeping bills low for most apartment dwellers and tripling
the number of customers with heavy subsidies to 250,000 households – a sixth of
DWP’s customers.
They
squandered tens of millions of dollars pretending to go green but have the
worst renewable energy portfolio in the state so they are desperate to buy wind
and solar power from anybody who has some no matter what it costs to meet the
20 percent goal mandated by the state by the end of this year.
They have
painted themselves into a corner and don’t know any other way except to slug it
to the middle class, from those just getting by on two family incomes to those
in the upper middle class who have seen their wealth decline sharply and their
incomes fall.
This is
their cockeyed theory of municipal socialism laid bare, a redistribution of
wealth that gives pennies to the poor and feeds the insider culture that has
feasted so long on the public treasury.
The DWP
is the city’s cash cow. It has hired 1,400 workers since the recession began
and now has transferred 300 city workers facing layoffs to its payroll with
most of them getting raises of 20 to 40 percent.
When
other city workers gave up raises, City Hall rewarded DWP employees with 3.25
percent lump sum cash payments and guaranteed them raises of up to 4 percent
for the following four years – raises for people who already are the highest
paid utility workers in the nation.
Somebody
has got to pay the bills for all this featherbedding and over-indulgence, and
that’s you.
Somebody
has got to pay for all these sweetheart contracts for contractors, consultants
and power purchases, and that’s you.
Somebody
has got to pay the bills to rebuild the water and power infrastructure that is
bursting and blowing up from neglect while they put the money into the pockets
of workers and insiders, and that’s you.
And every
time you pay more, don’t forget that nearly 20 percent of your money goes
straight into the general fund to bail out City Hall from its deficits that
total billions of dollars and are going up every week by millions of dollars.
Somebody
has got to pay, alright. I say make them pay. If you want to help me do that,
go up to the right-hand column of this page and see how you can donate to OurLA.org,
my non-profit community news and networking site so I can hire a reporter who
will work full-time to penetrate the secrecy of the DWP and expose where your
money is really going.
Or you
can just get used to paying more and more of your hard-earned money for less and
less.