Home > So, what do you think? > Archives > 2008 > July > 23
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
More thoughts on ElectriCities …
I appreciated Terry Smith’s comments in The Daily Southerner this week. He and I don’t see eye to eye on the ElectriCities issue, but that’s OK. In fact, our disagreement illustrates part of my problem with the power agency.
If newspaper readers in Tarboro, Rocky Mount or Nashville don’t agree with my opinion or the way the Telegram reports the news, they have other options. They can subscribe to The Daily Southerner or to the Nashville Graphic or to the News & Observer of Raleigh. A lot of them can go online and read newspapers from all over the state, country and even the world. That’s not what I would want them to do, of course, but they have that option.
With ElectriCities, we have no option.
If the agency wants to raise rates, it raises them, and we pay it. If it wants to pay its top CEO a half a million dollars a year, it can do so, and never mind what it does to struggling dry cleaners and other small businesses. If it wants to abandon fixed-rate bonds for variable-rate bonds and watch those suckers go soaring, there’s not a thing I can do to stop it.
I guess I could cancel my subscription by pulling the plug on every appliance I have and closing my power account with the city, but that’s not very practical.
And that’s what really bugs me and, I think, a lot of other folks about this situation. ElectriCities doesn’t have to be accountable. We, the customers, have next to no choice about whether we pay the agency’s rates. We have no voice in who the company executives are or how much they’re paid. We’re pretty much at the mercy of the people who serve on the board that does oversee those issues.
So, given all that, I’d like to see the one group of people whom we directly elect stand up and raise some of the same fuss that we’re raising about this situation.
A 14 percent increase in rates when almost 30 people at the agency are pulling in six figures? A 14 percent increase when at least 2 percent seems to stem from poor investment decisions?
Maybe I’m living in a dream world by hoping that someone on a city council somewhere will stand up, pound a podium, shake a fist and start ranting. But I certainly don’t think it’s asking too much to hope a town council will one day ask some tough questions and let the board know how we feel before blindly passing along a rate hike that’s going to send some people to the poor farm.
That’s not going to happen so long as town councils like Tarboro’s pass along a rate increase before the blame thing has even been approved by the ElectriCities board.
