Why your electric rates are high

Published 3:04 pm Friday, June 5, 2020

To the Editor:

For Jt Oaks, who questions TVA about their extravagant spending, here is why: BECAUSE THEY CAN. And here is how they obtained the positions where they can live very comfortably off the dollars of the ratepayers and taxpayers.

For you who vote red, this is just another goal of the Republican party, and that is to make themselves very wealthy off the taxpayers’ and ratepayers’ dollars. It started when the voters turned our country over to the Republicans when George W. Bush was in office. The Republicans saw an opportunity to funnel our money into their pockets and use TVA as a reward system for their influential Republican cronies. All Bush, along with Lamar Alexander and Bill Frist needed to do was restructure TVA into a “Business Model.” They threw away the three-member board and replaced it with a CEO and a nine-member board. The CEO was given a salary more than the previous three-member board, and of course the nine-member governing board would have their perks, too. If they wanted raises, the new board had no problems raising the rates of the citizens. But to beat it all, none of them had any experience in running an electric utility. It was a political reward for them, under their control, to do whatever they wished, and they did.

Please notice that every few years the CEO is changed and receives a higher compensation package. Also, please note that the nine-member board recycles and the members are replaced by pro-Republican influential members. If they want more money, they just pass the raises. They aren’t held accountable.

And that, Jt Oaks, is how TVA became the biggest reward system for Republicans, at the expense of us, the ratepayers. And one more thing, TVA has given big corporations a lower electricity rate, but the common ratepayers’ rate have gone up to pay for it. I have watched this for years, but have seen no one do anything about it. (The Republicans’ next installment at taking from us is privatizing the Post Office to get the millions in a USPS account to pay benefits for postal workers 75 years down the road. That’s George W. Bush’s new accounting system he set up under his reign.)

Thank you for letting me inform the people of the truth.

Janet Hyder

Elizabethton