The war on low-income residents continues nationwide and this week Texas took a harsh step forward, ending a program to lower electric utility payments:
Texas will no longer help low-income families pay their electric bills. Lite-Up Texas, a program that offered discounts to hundreds of thousands of poor Texas families over the years, has run out of money and the discounts ended on Aug. 31, the Public Utility Commission confirmed.
The cancellation will affect a huge number of Texas residents:
About 700,000 households relied on the program in 2015, according to the Public Utility Commission, with state subsidies reducing their electric bills from 25 percent to 31 percent.
Texas Republicans regularly raided the fund to help balance the budget:
The program doled out hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance, even as lawmakers occasionally tapped its funding source — called the System Benefit Fund — to prop up the state’s budget.
In 2013, Rep. Sylvester Turner, a Democrat who is now Houston’s mayor, led an effort to force lawmakers to use the money as it was intended. He succeeded, though lawmakers also ended the surcharge of 65 cents per megawatt-hour that fueled the fund, which reached more than $800 million in 2013.
Read more about the program’s demise and how it will affect residents at KHOU.com or watch the video below:
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