Please add your/your organization’s name to the letter below, responses needed by Saturday
 

STOP SKYROCKETING GAS BILLS

AND SAVE 1000 JOBS!

·         Join clergy, community and labor to save 1000 entry-level jobs at Southern California Gas Co. and keep natural gas bills affordable.

·        The Gas Co. wants to get rid of all its meter readers (the majority of whom are people of color) and raise our bills to pay for it!!!  The Gas Co. stands to make $200 million!

Commissioner  Michael Peevy

California Public Utilities Commission
505 Van Ness Avenue

San Francisco, CA 94102

Dear Commissioner Peevey,

We understand that you and the Commission you head are considering granting Southern California Gas Co. more than a billion dollars in rate increases in order to install a new meter reading device which, even in the long run, will raise natural gas bills. As a multiracial network of and representing grassroots women beginning with those who have least, we are outraged.  We believe in investing in caring, and nothing in the Gas Co.’s proposal will make our families and communities safer or better off.  In fact it will make our job as caregivers harder as it makes us and our loved ones poorer.  Indeed the Commission is silencing the voice of those of us impacted, starting with, but not only, communities of color, by not even bothering  to hold any public hearings in the Southland so that those of us affected by this proposal can tell the Commission what we think of it.

One of the reasons we are outraged is because in the process you will be destroying more than 1,000 meter reading jobs now filled overwhelmingly by people of color and women, many of us single mothers. This move is not only racist and sexist, but will literally take food off our tables and put many families in jeopardy of losing the roof over their heads.  We also know that the Gas Co. did everything it could to hide that fact both from the Commission and from the general public, shame on them. 

In the middle of the worst recession in living memory, with unemployment of women, and particularly women of color, running around 20% (26.5% for young Black women), we cannot afford this experiment with unproven technology which will not only cost us jobs, but also raise our utility rates.  And whether it is our job or the job of our partner which is eliminated, our families will lose not only income on which we depend but also health insurance and other benefits – in fact we can lose everything.

It is also clear that the Gas Co.’s claim that they are “going green” by doing this is a sham.  They must not be allowed to hide this mess under a “green” umbrella, to do so would at best be deceptive. According to your Commission’s own Division of Rate Payer Advocates the energy savings will be negligible or non-existent from the Gas Co.’s proposal.  If they were serious about saving energy there are a lot of ways in which a billion dollars could be used that would allow families to save energy and lower our bills, such as free energy audits and low interest loans or grants to those of us who are low-income to weather-proof our homes.

Furthermore we understand that one function the meter readers perform is to do a visual inspection of and around the meter every month as they read the meter; this is vital and must be continued. By doing away with the meter readers, that monthly inspection will also be done away with.  The meter readers have in fact been acting as safety inspectors of our homes and communities, something critical to those of us who are the primary care-givers for children and other loved ones, whether or not we also work outside the home.  Do not put our families and communities at risk by implementing this reckless and ill-conceived proposal.

Frankly, we are well aware that the only reason the Gas Co. is proposing this costly proposition is because they can make a profit off the new meter reading devices.  For them to charge us more, throw people out of work, and decrease family and community safety so they can make even more profit (more than $250 million annually now), is criminal.

We hope you will prevent this loss of jobs, increase in rates, and loss of safety now being proposed by the Gas Co.  Your job is to protect us, not their profits. 

Yours sincerely,

Margaret Prescod                                                         Sidney Ross Risden
for Women of Color in the Global Women’s Strike       for the Global Women’s Strike/L.A.