Joe Rangel stood before a packed house in the Maggie Trejo Supercenter, assuring the crowd packed into chairs and lining the walls that they could find help on surging water utility bills.
Most residents in the audience would pay double on their water bill before even turning on a faucet and still more for sewer costs as massive water supply projects change from lines on paper to pipes in the field.....
Only households making $22,000 a year or less need apply, Rangel explained. And of households under that income ceiling, only those with someone elderly, or disabled, or a primary caretaker with a child would be eligible, he added, to silent, answering nods.
Then he laid out the discount. Qualified families could receive $2 off their bill, Rangel said. Lubbock could offer the most desperate homes more than $5 a month off.
Councilman Todd Klein, one of the authors of the rate assistance Lubbock adopted, said he would continue to monitor enrollment.
"I'm obviously deeply disappointed," said Klein. "I spent a lot of hours trying to come up with something."
But he did not believe the program was necessarily failing.
The point of the discount was to help residents scraping for every dollar, he said.
Adams agreed.
"The goal was to try to identify the truly needy," Adams said. "If it's not a benefit, if it's not important, then they may not be truly needy."(LAJ)
5 dollars that has to be a joke, and I can not believe that Klien "Spent a lot of hours trying to come up with something." How about give back the raises the council gave themselves last year, thats is just to extreme to ever truely consider as an option. They are probably truly needy buy 5 dollars isnt worth their trouble to go to meetings to recieve their rebate, Transportation cost more than that.
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