Colorado Activists and Leaders Rally for Solutions to High Utility Rates

By Victoria Acuña

Community advocates gathered last week on the west steps of the Colorado State Capitol to rally for legislative action to stop high utility bills across the state fueled by gas.

Last year, Xcel Energy started the process to increase electric rates by $312 million. The rate increase would start this fall, and the average residential customer would see an increase of $7.33/month on their utility bill. With customers seeing high utility bills over this past winter, this increase would only add to the financial hardships many are already experiencing, especially with high housing costs.

Danny Katz, Executive Director of CoPIRG, welcomed rally attendees and introduced the first speaker, Pastor Topazz McBride. McBride, who is Vice President of Social Justice for the Greater Denver Ministerial Alliance and Environmental Justice Committee Chair for the NAACP Aurora Chapter, spoke about financial hardship.

*A list of utility bill costs from rally attendees at the Colorado State Capitol on April 12, 2023.* **(Photo: Karen Gutiérrez/El Semanario)**

“I am representing the fact that there are many churches and other non-profit organizations that are in critical condition because they cannot afford the high bills from Xcel Energy. They are out of control. My church, Restoration Christian Fellowship, is a place for unhoused residents in the Aurora area…The last utility bill we received was ten thousand dollars. Last year, it was twenty-five hundred dollars,” she said. “We need a quality of life at every level, we need to get these bills down.”

MacKenzie Roebuck-Walsh, a representative for Mountain Mamas, spoke after McBride. “We are an organization of mothers and parents who really feel that it’s important for our children to grow up in a world where they can experience a clean environment. High energy bills also impact us all as parents. For my family, my husband came to me in December and said, ‘I think I forgot to pay last month’s electric bill.’ And he didn’t forget, it just doubled in one month to five hundred and sixty dollars for a single-family home. This caused us to rethink some of our Christmas plans.”

“We are the fortunate ones who can rethink a simple thing like holiday plans. But so many families were impacted beyond that–not what toys they’re going to buy this winter, but what food they can get,” Walsh said. “These utility bills have real impacts on our families. And the fact that they’re carried on the back of gas–a resource that also has a negative impact on our environment–reverberates for all of us.”

Colorado has long struggled with air pollution, especially along the front range. A significant portion of this pollution comes from the growth of fossil fuels. Legislative action is being worked on in order to address the severe EPA violations many front range counties are experiencing.

In response to high utility rates, legislators formed a Joint Select Committee in February to explore causes of, and solutions to, Colorado’s record high utility bills. Two of the members of the committee were present: Representative Chris deGruy Kennedy and Matt Martínez.

“I have heard loud and clear a call for action, and I am here to tell you that action is going to be coming,” said Kennedy. “We’re hoping to introduce a piece of legislation next week that’s going to do a few big things. First of all, it’s going to be taking away some of those profit motives to be building out gas infrastructure that we do not need in Colorado.”

Martínez added, “Just because some of us are in rural Colorado, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t facing the same issues that people have in Denver.”

In the crowd watching the rally was Denver District 9 Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca, who is preparing for a runoff election on June 6th.

“These rate hikes became a huge issue in the winter. Initially my constituents brought it to my attention, and I had been so inundated that I didn’t even look at my own bill. When I did, I was like, this is pretty insane and my house is tiny. We’ve been trying to figure out what the local government has potential to do, because my big dream is municipalization of our public utilities,” she said. “I think that for us, we just have to have bigger conversations at the city level about how we push what’s happening here [the state Capitol] to change the public utilities commission structure and allow us to do some of the innovative things we want to do.”

Energy Outreach Colorado attended the rally and offered their services at the rally. If you need assistance with your utility bills, you can check out their programs and initiatives here.

Victoria Acuña is an Independent Reporter for The Weekly Issue/El Semanario.