KHOU-11’s Doug Miller reports that our businessman-mayor is considering an advertising educational campaign for electricity firms that don’t have their names attached to a football stadium:
Now, Houston’s mayor wants to encourage more people to shop around for their electricity. He’s talking about spending around $1 million on a public education campaign that would show Houstonians how to compare prices between different electricity providers.
The state government is deregulating electric rates.
“Most people, when they get a utility bill, think that there’s somebody out there looking at the rates of these companies,” Mayor Bill White said. “Now it’s going to have to be the consumers themselves rather than the city.”
“This being a capitalist society and not a socialist society,” said Houston City Councilmember Addie Wiseman.
But a couple of council members wonder whether the city government should get involved.
“Well, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing with these electricity rates, because it’s not just the original sticker price. There is a lot of add-ons that these companies have and some of them go out of business and so you find out that sticking with the original Houston company may turn out to be better even though it didn’t look like it at first,” said Houston City Councilmember Michael Berry.
Why can’t electric companies competing for business educate potential consumers? Why does the city have to spearhead the effort (to the tune of $1 million)?
Interestingly, the Houston Chronicle editorial board floated this notion that not enough Houstonians were abandoning Reliant last summer. It’s still not clear why this is a matter of public policy. Surely political journalists and the mayor’s staff can come up with more important priorities for the mayor’s second term than this. If not, perhaps they could invite the bH crew and commenters out for dinner some Wednesday night and we could help them out.
UPDATE (02-09-2006): Matt Stiles and Mike Snyder cover this story for the Chronicle.
Also, KTRK-13’s Mike McGuff suggests in the comments that Jeff Ehling will have a related story on KTRK today at 4:55 pm.
UPDATE 2 (02-09-2006): Jeff Ehling’s story is posted here.
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