This year, the average City of Austin utility customer who receives electric, water and drainage bills will pay roughly $30 to fund discounts for low-income ratepayers. In some cases, this Customer Assistance Program (CAP) can prevent a household from choosing between food or utilities in these pandemic-ravaged times. Austin Energy and Austin Water expect to put a total $17.5 million toward these discounts this year.
Most Austinites might be proud to live in such a compassionate city. But some of these funds go to people who don’t need the help, or they fail to promote the energy savings that Austin residents should expect.
In December 2014, the Austin American-Statesman ran a front-page story reporting an analysis I conducted of CAP recipients. It revealed some of the CAP discounts intended for the poor were inadvertently routed to people who lived in expensive homes or owned more than one property.
CAP was automatically providing utility bill discounts to people who participated in certain social service programs,such Supplemental Security Income or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, assuming this was a proxy for a low-income household. No one checked to see whether these customers lived in a larger or wealthier home. An affluent family could still end up on the list if, for example, they have a foster child on CHIP, or an elderly parent in the home receiving SSI.
One of the homes Robbins has identified as receiving discounts through Austin Energy’s Customer Assistance Program, which is intended to assist low-income customers (note the private tennis court) (Courtesy of Paul Robbins)
Last Thursday, Paul Robbins, a longtime local consumer advocate and environmental activist, filed a complaint with the Office of the City Auditor over Austin Energy‘s $18 million Customer Assistance Program (CAP) discounts – designed to help lower-income customers with utility bills but in practice being offered to owners of some very expensive properties.
Paul Robbins’ chief question for the auditor is how Austin Energy determines customers are income-restricted, given their apparent wealth in real estate assets.
In his six years of digging into the CAP system, Robbins has identified many more loopholes and inefficiencies, which he outlines in his complaint with OCA. Chief among them is that CAP eligibility is unlinked to AE’s progressive residential electric rate structure, which has five tiers; the high-usage customers (for example, the large mansions Robbins calls out in his report) pay more than the lower tiers. Ideally, Robbins says, “This does two things: It incentivizes conservation and simultaneously helps the poor, who use less energy on an average basis. But some people on CAP do use electricity in these higher tiers.” His complaint cites data from 2015 in which 21% of customers with CAP discounts were fourth- and fifth-tier energy users.
In the report, Robbins details the multiple instances in which AE has refused to provide information, or provided it after much delay, over the past six years. That’s why he’s taken this step: “They can stay up nights trying to figure out ways to keep public information from me, but they can’t do that to the auditor.”
Clarification: The estate in this photo above is indeed owned by a customer receiving CAP, but the CAP discount is going to another home owned by the same customer.
