Bills Already a Burden for Some
The lights have already been dimmed in Teresita’s Restaurant in East Los Angeles. Now the prices may go up.
The 100-watt porch light on Edith Keller’s mobile home in Bell was turned off, and now she can only watch as her bills suck up more of her Social Security check.
And Sylvia Yu of Temple City may even go back to Mexico, rather than face the $200-a-month electric bill that now may soar even higher.
“I was just talking to my mom about moving back to Mexico,” Yu said. “The cost of living is too much here.”
For Southland residents already living on the fringe of their budgets, another utility rate hike could send them over the edge.
For Southland residents already dealing with the struggling economy, high natural gas bills and rolling blackouts, another utility rate hike could send some over the edge. Many are already living on the fringe of their budgets.
It’s enough to inspire Chris Consalvo to get out of the electric era. She’s seriously considering candles and firewood for her one-bedroom Culver City house, where electricity bills were so high this winter, the 31-year-old social worker pays them on installments.
“What’s going through my mind is going back to the basic elements,” a frustrated Consalvo said Sunday, as word filtered out that on Tuesday the PUC will consider allowing a utility rate increase. “I’ll get a wind-up clock and a wood-burning stove and call it a day, seriously.” she vowed.
Claudia McClellan, 35, said she may dip into her 12-year-old daughter’s college fund to pay for the increase. The San Fernando resident works 12 hours a day, seven days a week as manager of Electra Plus furniture and appliance store..
Margarita Figueroa, 56, has already had to take on side jobs just to save her El Monte hair salon, where she worries that the power could cut out on the blow dryers at any moment. So when the immigrant from Michoacan, Mexico, isn’t cutting hair, she’s altering as many as 20 pairs of pants a day for $2 each. When asked to, she readily cuts friends’ lawns. All the money from salon customers, she says, barely covers the shop’s utilities.
“At most, I make enough to pay for the business--not to enjoy other things,” Figueroa said Sunday. “I don’t think there’s honesty in these [rate hikes.] It’s just done to be greedy and it really complicates things, not only for me, but for my clientele, most of whom are poor.”
Nor does Figueroa escape the energy crunch and rate hikes at her La Puente home.
“The lights, the gas, the water--all has gone up,” she said. “We have less children in the house than last year, but the bills keep going up. How is that possible?”
Even some business owners who don’t face rate increases because they are served by the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power are worried about blackouts.
“If the power goes, ice cream melts, the milk can go bad,” said Morteza Javado, who owns a deli in Palms. “They are really killing me,” he said, as he pointed to a disconnect notice for failing to pay a $800 bill on time. “For a small business like this, without that much profit, that’s a lot.”
Antonio Hernandez Campos, manager of Teresita’s, not only dimmed the lights in his popular family eatery in East Los Angeles, he set the thermostat to a less comfortable 72 degrees and stopped using some appliances.
“I’m really worried about this summer, because it’s going to be hot,” said Hernandez, whose family raised the business from a parking-lot taco stand in 1983. Two can still dine here for $20. But not for long. Hernandez said Sunday he may be raising prices to keep the business going.
“It’s going to be a good chunk of money,” he said about any rate hike. “We were paying $1,500 a month last summer as it is. We’ll be OK, but we’ll have to make an adjustment.”
There is little room for adjustment elsewhere. Consalvo, for example, hasn’t used her dishwasher in six months. When she received an astronomical bill several months ago--the result of heating her home with a space heater--she nearly fainted.
“It was just crazy the amount they were asking,” she said. “I don’t use my dishwasher. I use minimal resources. I’m a bare-minimum person anyway.”
At the La Fiesta discount store on Whittier Boulevard, which sells everything from children’s toys to cellular telephones, manager Juan Cevallos shut down the air conditioning last week, though a massive speaker still pumped melancholy ranchero music out toward shoppers. “We have to keep it on or people don’t come; No one knows we’re here,” he explained.
“People with big bucks, it doesn’t matter much,” Cevallos said of threatened rate hikes. “But business is tough for us.”
Ira Kohan, a partner in the Vista Discount Store down the boulevard from Cevallos, was running one small desktop fan to cool himself, while the air stagnated in the rest of the store. “I can turn off some extra lighting, but not everything, because we have refrigerators.”
Bills run $600 to $700 a month in the summer, and if that becomes the norm in cooler months, prospects for staying in business look bleak, Kohan said. “If they have to make it a little higher, OK, but not too high that people can’t pay,” he said.
Edith Keller, 66, can all but hear the crackle from the high-voltage wires running along the Los Angeles River channel near the mobile home she rents in Bell. She’s turned the porch light off at night for the first time in 11 years, hoping her rent--which has the utilities tagged on by the landlord--won’t eat up the last bit of her monthly Social Security check. Three quarters of it goes to rent as it is, she said.
“We’re cutting down,” Keller said from her breezy front porch, where a clock-sized thermometer read a cool 70 degrees. “We used to keep my porch light on. I don’t do that anymore. We very seldom turn on the television. Very few programs we watch there.”
Across the 710 Freeway in Bell Gardens, Margarita Samayoa turned off the big-screen television and a smaller wall-mounted unit inside the Gloria Pupuseria restaurant. Two of four rows of fluorescent lights also were off. “The customers complain, but there’s nothing else we can do,” Samayoa said.
“Let’s hope they solve this,” said Samayoa, who left Guatemala 15 years ago. “In poor countries, they don’t have this, and here in a country that is so rich, they do. Imagine!”
Immigrants in Huntington Park trying to transfer American dollars to families back home didn’t have to ponder the irony. They were turned away mid-transaction when the power was cut off last Monday at the Vencell money-transfer office on Pacific Boulevard.
“One guy was sending $600 and I had to give him his money back because the machine shut down before it could give him a confirmation,” said Amparo Munera, a worker at the office. “They’ve got to find a solution. We’ll lose our work.”
Reginald Harris, a 38-year-old Compton resident who is disabled from work at an auto parts supply store, worries that the poor are the first to shoulder the burden for crisis created by everyone.
“I’ve got enough on my shoulders without having to pay for a higher electric bill,” said Harris, who supports four children and his mother. “And I’m not using much electricity as it is. . . . Everybody is entitled to live as comfortably as they possibly can, within reason. But I believe it’s a joint effort. Everybody has to join in and cut back. You can’t force people. But by the same token you can’t force the little people to pay. We don’t have any money left to enjoy life.”
That’s the news Alhambra resident Ben Salas will have to deliver to his grandchildren. No matter how bad things were, the 60-year-old sheet-metal worker always packed his grandchildren into his 1965 Chevrolet camper for a vacation on the Central California coast. But with high gasoline prices, natural gas bills soaring and his electric bill possibly on the verge of doing the same, those beloved trips are the first thing to go.
“We just can’t do it,” said Salas, who lives in Alhambra. “We’ve had to tighten the belt a lot. We’ve just got to find an extra means of making money.”
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Times staff writers Hector Becerra and Erika Hayasaki contributed to this story.
