During the record heat wave of summer 2023, Entergy and Sewerage and Water Board denied City Council requests to suspend utility shut-offs for New Orleanians behind on their exorbitant (and often inaccurate) bills.
Advocates for utility customers say the number of households vulnerable to losing electricity and water has grown in recent years as heat waves, gas prices, hurricanes and rate hikes have made it harder for New Orleans residents to keep up with their utility bills.
“Folks are absolutely struggling,” said Jesse George, policy director at the Alliance for Affordable Energy. “We were getting calls on a weekly basis from people struggling with outrageous bills.”
Andreanecia Morris, executive director of HousingNOLA, said that energy bills have been a major part of the city’s housing affordability crisis, and that high utility bills are starting to impact more people.
“I’m hearing from people who don’t normally struggle with their bills, which is never a good sign,” Morris said.
According to that article, during the summer there were something like 24,000 accounts considered "delinquent" by S&WB 1,100 of which were facing disconnection. Meanwhile, Entergy is a little more shifty with its numbers. But one out of five accounts behind on bills seems like a lot.
It is harder to pin down how many Entergy New Orleans customers are vulnerable to shutoffs. Customers owe $6.2 million in electric bill debt and $639,000 in gas bill debt, according to numbers the company provided to the council in late August. But neither the council nor Entergy provided any estimate on the number of customers in debt to the company.
Entergy executives did tell the council in Dec. 2022 that 36,000 customers — roughly one in five New Orleans accounts — had entered deferred payment plans to keep up with bills they couldn’t afford in 2022 alone.
This week we also learned that Entergy bills are higher than they've ever been for most New Orleanians. Perhaps not coincidentally, so are Entergy profits.
At the same time as bills have reached historic highs, so have dividend payments to Entergy shareholders. Entergy New Orleans’ parent company, Entergy Corp., has paid out $3.2 billion in shareholder dividends since 2020.
Burke and other advocates have long warned that the company has effectively shifted most of the risk of the business onto the shoulders of customers, who have to deal with erratic bills while shareholders enjoy steady, rising profits.
In any case, it's a lot of people who Entergy just figures it can ignore repeatedly.
And then there's this story.
The lights are back on at Saint John and the French Quarter restaurant is planning to reopen, marking a swift turnaround from just a day before.
Thursday afternoon chef/owner Eric Cook announced that Saint John was closed "indefinitely" amid a dispute over an Entergy bill for $40,000 that resulted in the restaurant's power being disconnected.
In a statement released Thursday, and in a subsequent interview, Cook described the decision to close as a culmination of frustrations with doing business in New Orleans, and the Entergy billing dispute as the last straw.
However, Cook said Friday that after a morning meeting with representatives from City Councilmember Helena Moreno's office, he heard from Entergy that power to the restaurant at 1117 Decatur St. would be restored while he and the utility work through the billing issue. Moreno sits on the City Council's Utilities, Cable, Telecommunications and Technology Committee, which oversees the council's responsibilities as regulator of Entergy New Orleans.
And so there you have it. If you want to be heard fairly by Entergy, you should simply own your own restaurant and have enough reach to get enough people mad on the news. Why doesn't everybody do that?
No comments:
Post a Comment