Attention all Texans who use a cell phone or landline: The Watchdog has bad news.
Starting with September’s phone bill, your bill is going up.
I can’t provide a specific number for you except to say that all Texas phone users are about to contribute to a $210 million fund to pay a backlog of debt owed to rural telephone companies and phone co-ops.
Although I can’t be specific about your increase, I can show you below how to get an estimate of your particular price jump.
In my case, the increase for this surcharge — called the Texas Universal Service Fund — will boost the USF fee on my bill from $2 a month to $14.
Who to blame for this fiasco? Our old friends who previously ran the (Public) Utility Commission before they were bounced out for incompetence after the February 2021 freezeout disaster. (Remember I took away the “P” away until the UC shows greater care for the public.)
Another culprit here is Gov. Greg Abbott.
Both had a chance to fix this, but both backed out. I’ll show you why.
If you get a sense of déjà vu that you’ve heard this before, it is similar to the electricity crisis.
Just like with the electricity crisis, Abbott and his previous slate of (p)UC commissioners abandoned us by the side of the road, drove off and left us paying the bills.
Every month, Texas phone users pay toward the Universal Service Fund so that dozens of rural telephone companies can provide phone service to several million Texans who live in remote areas. The cost of wiring is too expensive.
In the past several years the (p)UC fell behind in making the payments mandated by the Texas Legislature. The rate was 3.3% of the basic service cost on your phone bill.
In June 2020, the (p)UC staff recommended that the fee increase to 6%, but commissioner Arthur D’Andrea blocked it, saying “This is not a time when we should be raising taxes on people.”
The (p)UC chair, DeAnn Walker, said to “leave the fund as it is.”
When the Texas Legislature tried to fix the backlog last year, Abbott vetoed the bill, saying “It would have imposed a new fee on millions of Texans.”
Well, I’m all for blocking fees, but in this case, by avoiding the problem, the new rate jumps from 3.3% to a whopping 24%.
“We have been baffled by this from the beginning,” says Mark Seale of the Texas Telephone Association about state leaders’ avoidance of this growing debt. “If they’d raised the rate two years ago at 6% they would have avoided this entire thing.”
Annoying! The reason this is happening now is because the Texas Telephone Association filed a lawsuit against the PUC and won in court, with the ruling upheld by the appeals court. The PUC responded with the fee hike, which goes into effect on August 1. I think the reason why Abbott acted as he did is simple enough: He got to claim the credit for blocking the more modest fee increase, with the chance that it would end there. Now that that has blown up, it’s more complicated to pin on him, since generally speaking one doesn’t associate the governor with one’s phone bills. It’s also a typical case of the followup story being of a far lower profile than the initial one. As craven as Greg Abbott is, it’s hard to see this landing on him. But at least now you know.