Young: Great Texas energy assistance fund heist

WACO, Texas — You might say that Connie Bauer needed the money a lot more than Texas budget writers did, especially after she got the $400-plus electric bill.

The Grand Prairie mother has three autistic children. The family relies on Supplemental Security Income.

Fortunately, a thoughtful someone at the phone company told her help might be available with her electric bill. The good news is that it was. The bad news is that for others like her, it isn't.

Bauer is receiving roughly a 20 percent discount on subsequent bills and a break retroactive to the whopper that sent her head spinning.

She got the break through the System Benefit Fund (SBF), which this year Texas lawmakers have graciously allowed to do what it was meant to do — at least for some who desperately need it.

The fund, created with electric deregulation, accumulates from a surcharge of 65 cents per megawatt hour on each of our electric bills. It was devised as a way to ease the potential sting of deregulation. You know: compassionate conservatism.

Everyone was on board. The utilities supported it wholeheartedly.

The dollars started stacking high. The Lite Up program was helping more than 700,000 low-income Texans homes — with discounts on electric bills and also with weatherization. (Today that number is closer to 300,000.)

Then came the 2003 Legislature, under Republican control for the first time since Reconstruction. The state also was in a revenue slump. To back up "no new taxes" promises and still balance the books, writers found the SBF cookie jar and effectively confiscated it. It's one of a plethora of funds set apart from the general fund that have been commandeered to balance the budget with "no new taxes." Another victimized fund has been that raised for state parks through a special tax on sporting goods.

Last session voices of compassion and conscience like state Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, stirred enough support among colleagues to start freeing up money from the System Benefit Fund.

But only a portion of it. Though flush with $506 million, assistance is available to only about a half of those it could and should serve.

That unspent money is being used for something else entirely, to make politicians look like better fiscal stewards than they are.

Electric rates have skyrocketed under deregulation. The "compassionate" part of the bargain that helped make free-market electricity sound palatable has been left back on the slaughterhouse floor among the suet and scraps.

At the same time that funds have been confiscated, foul-ups in identifying eligible recipients of utility aid have denied families.

Initially, Bauer's understanding was that she did not qualify for such money, because the aid that qualified her household for the funding was in her children's name and not hers.

She contacted Carol Biedrzycki, an Austin consumer activist with Texas ROSE (Ratepayers Organization to Save Energy), who helped her find out what was rightfully her family's.

Biedrzycki deals with scores of families crushed by breathtaking electric bills.

"A lot of people who are suffering and really struggling shouldn't have to be. It makes me want to hurt someone," she said, "hurt those people who are holding these funds back."

She credited the last Legislature for freeing up some money, and acknowledges that the discount is higher than before. She points out, however, that the successful weatherization program under the System Benefit Fund has been suspended.

Some law-of-the-jungle conservatives chafe at the notion of having energy assistance at all. Well, guess what? The same conservatives used the ploy — energy assistance to the poor — to grease the wheel for deregulation.

To Texas deregulation acolytes: You're going to have a fund designated for energy aid? Great. Use it for that, not for dry-cleaning the curtains in the Capitol.

John Young writes for the Waco Tribune-Herald.