Speaker: Martin Sara
Say your name and where in Florida you live. How have high electricity bills impacted you? What are your concerns?
Martin Sara: My name is Martin Sara and I live in Coral Gables uh over the past few months. Uh I like many other Floridians have noticed that our energy bill has been skyrocketing and this comes to seemingly almost purely just running the ac in one of the hottest summers we've had in years. Um It seems insane how just running the AC and nothing else seems to have run my, my roommate's energy bill by nearly 100% than it has since March. That is unacceptable. We come from paying around 100 and 50 a month to over 250 on some months for no, no justification. Um We understood that they were raising the rates probably because of inflation, but this doesn't make any sense because the complete ridiculous rate that we've received does not match the quality of service we've gotten, we've still had outages, brownouts and loss of power. Uh More than more than we can recall. And this definitely doesn't justify a nearly 100% increase per month per month. This is affecting me in paying rent. It's affecting me in saving for future expenses, uh like a future car or a future house down payment. This is setting me back more than it should, especially since inflation is hitting every Floridian as well. Not just the energy companies.
What do you want to say to the utility corporations responsible? What do you want Florida's politicians to do?
Martin Sara: Utility corporations need to stop, uh, beating around the bush and come to terms with, uh, using renewable energy sources, uh, burning fossil fuel and importing, uh, energy are not long term solutions that are gonna run, uh, that are gonna run them a profit. It's just ridiculous because we're the only ones getting shelves at the cost. Um, it's insane how prioritizing short term profit is both squeezing Americans out of their lost dollars and completely catapulting themselves into obsolesces in the future when there's nothing left to pick, uh, from our resources. Um, politicians in Florida need to step up and apply some hard limits to how much they can raise the rates for Floridians, for power and for utilities and need to start pushing and giving incentives for actual renewable energy sources that we can use to make sure that we're not being completely scavenged.
