EL PASO, Texas (KVIA) — El Paso City Council voted against a proposed settlement that would have brought the proposed gas rate increase down to 10%. <\/p>\n
The Texas Gas Service proposed to bring rates up 27% as part of their service consolidation throughout the state. City Council unanimously voted against that proposal two weeks ago, and again voted against this proposal. <\/p>\n
This new proposal would bring rates up by just 10%, but Mayor Renard Johnson doesn’t think they should go up at all and believes that they can get a better rate. <\/p>\n
“I think we can do better. El Pasoans are feeling the increases on the utilities and this is something we’ve got to make sure that we can do better.” <\/p>\n
Johnson was the tie breaking vote. The proposal was voted against 5-4. Representative Chris Canales was one of the members who voted for the proposal. He wanted to eliminate the risk of having a higher rate increase altogether. <\/p>\n
“I think that it’s tough to say that I’m comfortable with gambling with other people’s money,” said Canales. “I personally voted for this settlement because I don’t think that we’re going to do better than what was on the table.” <\/p>\n
The city’s legal team and Texas Gas are still working together to find another settlement. Canales is worried they won’t get a better offer, but Johnson is confident they can. <\/p>\n
“I think it can only improve,” said Johnson. “we can always accept tomorrow the 8%. But I think, you heard from council strongly today, that they want to make sure that that’s the best number. And that number they feel is lower.” <\/p>\n
The decision now goes to the Texas Railroad Commission. They’ll begin to discuss the case in the next couple weeks. Canales believes that they will continue with the original 27% increase, but also knows the city is working to make things better. <\/p>\n
“In addition to rejecting the settlement agreement today, we still directed the staff to continue working on this and trying to fight for the lowest increase possible.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EL PASO, Texas (KVIA) — El Paso City Council voted against a proposed settlement that would have brought…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":72540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[138,140,139],"class_list":["post-72539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}