TURN Saves Consumers $100 Million

TURN has defeated a scheme to discount gas rates for big businesses by shifting their responsibilities for the CARE low-income assistance program to residential consumers and small businesses.

Rising gas bills are especially hard on the growing ranks of low-income Californians, who may be forced to choose between heat and other necessities like food or medicine. CARE (California Alternative Rates for Energy) rates help them to keep them warm by giving eligible households a 20% reduction on their gas bills. CARE is funded by surcharges on gas bills. Individual costs are kept low by distributing the charges evenly between all customers, including big commercial and industrial ones.

But large, wealthy corporations did not want to pay their fair share for programs that help low-income Californians afford heat and hot water. They claimed that utility charges for CARE were bankrupting them, and they wanted everyone else to pay more so they could pay less.

About 2,000 of California's wealthiest companies would have received discounts totaling close to $100 million under the proposal TURN recently quashed at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). Large gas users would have benefited the most, including Exxon Mobil Corp., which last year recorded $40.6 billion in profits, the most ever for a U.S. company. Chevron Corp., with profits of $18.7 billion and Shell Oil, with worldwide profits of $75 million per day, also would have enjoyed lower rates.

Rates for residential and small business customers would have gone up the same amount. Eventually, CARE could have been cut because there would be fewer customers contributing to the program. TURN held the corporations and the utility companies accountable, exposing their claims that CARE costs were bankrupting them as fiction.

TURN has spent 35 years fighting utility company efforts to shift costs from their large, wealthy commercial customers onto residential and small business bills, and including other attempts by the large customers to discount their CARE contributions. TURN has held the line, and will continue demand that big businesses pay their fair share.

Click here to see a video what TURN members had to say about the rate hikes at the January CPUC meeting.

Read news coverage of TURN's victory for consumers over big business: