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.”
Listen: Dori Monson’s take
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.
