By Axel Gerdau for PowerSmack.org
A budget shortfall is threatening institutions of civic life in Austin. The newly elected City Council is scrutinizing municipal expenditures in order to save at least $43 million this year, and its members are considering shutting down swimming pools, cutting police services and reducing funding for public education. Yet Austin Energy is spending record sums – $1.4 billion in city funds this year – while continuously decreasing the opportunity for public scrutiny and meaningful dialogue. Transparency, so it seems, is a cornerstone of public policy but not when it comes to Austin’s energy.
This summer, after completing detailed cost and environmental analyses of possible options, Austin Energy canceled town hall meetings that would have allowed the public to provide meaningful and timely input on the city’s future energy mix. Instead, utility administrators have opted to present a final plan next week, which will outline their “final recommendations” for how Austin should generate its electricity in the future, and may hold town hall meetings later – once the AE plan is waiting for council approval.
Last year utility administrators rushed council members to agree to a 20-year, $2.3 billion supply contract with a company constructing a biomass plant only three weeks after the issue first appeared on the City Council agenda. Against the financial and environmental concerns of many, the council approved the measure, trusting Austin Energy’s judgment. But neither the public nor council members were happy with the process. “I think a much broader community discussion would’ve been preferable,” Council Member Laura Morrison said. “I rely on the citizens of this community to be asking questions from their perspective and expertise to help us all understand the bigger picture.” It’s a “really, really” big decision, she added, “one that I’ve definitely lost sleep over.”
Not only policy makers and individual citizens are concerned with Austin Energy’s style of communication. Industrial customers are disappointed too. In a memorandum to the Austin Generation Resource Planning Task Force, a committee that advises City Council, Task Force member Roger Wood with Freescale Semiconductor criticized the lack of transparency: “Businesses are frustrated of being told, ‘that’s confidential information’ or having decisions made that significantly impact their bill without their knowledge or input.”
But starting in 2001 secrecy became a cornerstone of Austin’s energy policy. At that time City Council adopted a resolution that aimed to protect the utility in case it ever entered the state’s newly deregulated electricity market. The ordinance stipulated what information the city’s monopoly utility would continue to make available and which “competitive matters” it could begin to conceal.
Since then Austin Energy has dramatically reduced the amount of information it shares with policy makers and the public, but its expenditures have increased dramatically. The capital improvements budget is one example. When the secrecy ordinance was renewed indefinitely in 2005, the utility was spending about $140 million in this area. Between 2006 and 2009 the sum grew by 146 percent, yet Austinites were largely left in the dark as to what that money, equivalent to more than half the city’s annual operating budget, is being spent on. And today their input is no longer required or asked for.
This wasn’t always the case. Back in the 80’s Austinites voted on all major expenditures the utility was to make (famously rejecting the utility’s plan to own additional coal power) and Austin’s utility supplied much more information. Yet when talk of deregulating Texas’ electricity market began in the mid 90’s, city administrators passed a utility “competitiveness resolution” calling for a more aggressive power marketing effort, reduced conservation spending, and decreased General Fund Transfer — a path that ultimately has reduced the organization’s transparency. Today it is clear that Austin’s utility has no intention of entering into the competitive electric market, yet Austin Energy is as secretive as ever.
The question is: How much does this lack of transparency benefit the citizens of of Austin?
Transparency and Information Disclosure have Decreased Substantially for Austin Energy
