Let the jockeying begin.
After City Manager Erik Walsh announced a plan last week to rebate $50 million of a roughly $75 million windfall back to CPS Energy customers, several council members offered competing plans to spend the money.
On Tuesday, during the first council’s first budget work session, those members will need to win at least some of their colleagues’ support if they want to any chance of seeing their ideas supersede the current rebate plan.
There isn’t much time; the council must decide by Sept. 1 if they’re going to implement the rebate.
On Monday, Councilman John Courage entered the fray with his own plan — that rebates should only go to San Antonio residents, rather than all customers. By cutting out commercial customers and those outside the city limits, the bill credit would average $75 rather than the $31 the city has estimated will go back to customers under its plan.
This plan would result in roughly $42 million being returned to San Antonio residents who are in desperate need of relief, Courage said.
Councilman Mario Bravo (D1) has been vocal about investing the surplus in ways that would help the city in the long term, by addressing climate change — even though his plan doesn’t use the phrase.
Bravo’s plan would spend $20 million on residential weatherization and energy efficiency upgrades, $20 million to mitigate urban heat island effects, which would include planting trees in the inner city and $10 million to convert local buildings into “community resiliency centers,” which he defined as additional cooling and/or heating centers.
CPS Energy’s energy efficiency and conservation plan, known as STEP, already includes weatherization and energy efficiency components; Bravo said his plan would complement that work.
Councilwoman Ana Sandoval (D7) also wants to use CPS Energy revenue to address climate-related issues, but rather than tap the windfall, she suggested using $8 to $10 million — the equivalent of revenue the city receives from CPS Energy’s conservation and efficiency program — to leverage federal funding, offer green business incentives, mitigate urban heat islands and offer grants to local community organizations to establish more cooling and/or warming centers across the city.
Bravo said Monday he thinks his and Sandoval’s plans would work well together, and he hopes to gain support from fellow council members Tuesday.
The city adopted a climate action plan in 2019, but it has been slow to get off the ground, in part due to the pandemic, and more recently because of economic concerns. A benchmark program of the plan that would have required owners of large buildings to report their energy consumption to the city, for example, will now be voluntary for the first two years.
Councilman Manny Pelaez’s (D8) suggestion for spending the windfall had nothing to do with the climate. He’d like to see that money spent to reduce domestic violence.
Clayton Perry, who represents District 10, said hearing all the ways his colleagues would spend the surplus made him cringe.
“Some of these ideas don’t pay off until way in the future,” he said, “but people are hurting now and need that money now.”
He has urged city staff to go beyond its current proposal and return all $75 million of the surplus to CPS Energy customers.
City staff has recommended returning $50 million to customers. Of that, $45 million would be returned as a 13.3% credit from July bills. For customers with an average $230 bill, the city calculates a $31 credit, which would show up on October energy bills.
That also means customers with higher bills, including commercial and industrial customers, would see bigger credits, which is why Courage would like to limit rebates to city residents.
The city’s plan would also inject $5 million into CPS Energy’s Residential Energy Assistance Program, which aids low income customers. It would spend the remaining $25 million to boost existing programs and projects.
The budget work session on Tuesday begins at 2 p.m.
