On December 1, 2014, a letter was sent to the Austin City Council alerting them to the problem that over a thousand Austin utility customers enrolled in the City’s Customer Assistance Program (CAP) for low-income ratepayers had high real estate assets. This poor targeting probably resulted hundreds of thousands of dollars a year of bill assistance being misspent on rate discounts to relatively wealthy homes. Below is a PDF file of the letter.
The City has sought to repair CAP, but the complete repair has taken over 3 years. Results of how well this repair has worked should be known by the summer of 2018.
The festering problem is discussed in more detail in another report on this site, Misguided Charity.