Kshama Sawant’s resolution on Seattle power rates fails to get a vote
Sep 24, 2014, 2:47 PM | Updated: 3:28 pm
A proposal to study possible changes in the way Seattle City Light bills its customers was shot down during a City Council committee hearing Wednesday.
The public utility has different classes of customers with residential customers charged under one rate structure and commercial customers getting a different, usually lower rate, based on size and location.
“The mentality in Seattle is if things aren’t perfect, we’ll get money from somebody else and give it to you. It’s a nauseating attitude,” says Monson.
“So I was so glad when the rest of the City Council humiliated Kshama Sawant when she went for her vote today.”
City Council Energy Committee chair Kshama Sawant thinks it’s unfair that residential customers pay more for power than commercial customers.
“Seattle City Light is a public utility and how much to charge every customer should be a policy decision based on what is fair,” she argued. “The whole bulk user rate is a sales tactic that for-profit corporations use and I don’t see why we are bound by that.”
Utility representatives call the rate structure complex and based in part of the cost of service.
Sawant’s resolution sought a review of the utility’s rate structure “with a view to lowering the cost to Seattle City Light’s non-business customers beginning in 2016.”
When she called for a vote at the end of a 30-minute discussion, no council member was willing to offer a “second” and the resolution died.
