Seattle City Light rate increase? Meeting tomorrow; e-mail tonight

| Utilities | West Seattle news | West Seattle politics

At last night’s Junction Neighborhood Organization meeting, president Erica Karlovits told WSB she’d heard from the office of City Councilmember Bruce Harrell – who leads the Energy and Technology Committee — saying the proposed Seattle City Light rate hike will be discussed at the Budget Committee meeting tomorrow morning. She says that if you’ve got anything to say about a possible rate hike, you’re urged to get your comments to Harrell ASAP: bruce.harrell@seattle.gov. That’s echoed by Patti Mullen of the West Seattle Chamber of Commerce, who passed along this link to Harrell’s website, where he spells out the possibilities – anywhere from 7 percent to almost 14 percent, under a variety of scenarios. (He discussed rate-hike scenarios at a WS Chamber brownbag in July, where we took the photo at left.) Mullen points out that it’s important for businesses to pay attention to this as well as residential ratepayers: “Local businesses are barely able to claim ‘recovery’ mode at present, and this level of increase could be devastating to West Seattle ’s small business community.” She attended a City Hall discussion yesterday and heard a variety of viewpoints, including businesses saying they’d like to see City Light’s strategic plan first, and workers saying the utility needs money to pay for infrastructure upgrades.

Rob November 12, 2009 (6:27 am)

So why do they want an increase? City Light sells surplus power, but the price has plummeted, so they’ve gotten less than half the revenue they expected. The poor economy hasn’t helped either.

City Light also says it has a lot of old equipment that needs replacing and their utility’s infrastructure, particularly in West Seattle and Capitol Hill, is in terrible shape. (quoted from Jeff Joy at Seattle City Light.)

Funny thing is that back in the days of surplus and good times SCL never bothered to put in a rate hike. Now that everyone is struggling, suddenly it’s time to have a rate increase! I think it’s time for an upper management shake up to include certain city counsel members.

With a 14% raise in rates, it would make more sense to switch to alternative power supplies. Seattle City Light is using the same excuses that Comcast uses to raise rates.

Mookie November 12, 2009 (9:52 pm)

Meanwhile the Washington UTC approved PSE’s request to lower natural gas rates by about 16% due to the continued decline in the wholesale cost of fuel—that rate drop started showing last month on the bill.

Sigh.

Sorry, comment time is over.