Tampa Bay Sierra Club <\/a>volunteers say TECO has already increased their rates three times this year and people should not have to choose between buying food and having electricity.\u00a0<\/p>\nLeranda Jones is a demonstrator who said she is a victim of the TECO Rate increase.<\/p>\n
\u201cGetting a\u00a0$250 bill and this month a $629 bill as you can see it was a shell shock. I did contact them if they could work with me and they gave me 30 days to pay the bill. You know the economy. I was not able to pay that bill in 30 days. So I\u2019m still in that crisis,\u201d Jones said.<\/p>\n
She was not the only demonstrator affected.\u00a0 Rayne Dejesus is a Tampa resident who has a $850 electric bill this month.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are calling for help now because this is almost a mortgage. This is $400 shy of our mortgage payment and this is just from October 3 when we got our bill cycle. I don\u2019t know what TECO has going on but they definitely need to burn the bill and give us more affordable energy,\u201d Dejesus said.<\/p>\n
Congresswoman Kathy Castor said Tampa pays one of the highest electric bills in the country. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are here to say we are angry about it and we want policy makers ,\u201d Castor said. <\/p>\n
She said electricity is up 10% and 1 in 3 households are cutting back on necessity to pay their electric bills. She said 3 in 4 people are concerns about sky high bills. <\/p>\n
\u201cTECO customers saw their bills increase by 76% between December 2020 and September 2025,\u201d said Food & Water Watch in a press release.<\/p>\n
After the burning of the bills, demonstrators stood on the sidewalk holding signs and chanting for change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Demonstrators upset and frustrated by TECO electric bills. Photo by Leah Burdick On November 4th the Public Service…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31263,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[20709,22353,135,22354,137,136,22355],"class_list":["post-31262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-electric-rates","tag-psc","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-bay-sierra-club","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news","tag-teco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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