Cook County Utility Taxes

Link: http://www.standingupforillinois.org/feature.php?id=152

Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn will join Citizens Utility Board (CUB) and consumers Wednesday, October 3, 2007, in blasting Cook County President Todd Stroger�s proposal to slap utility consumers with hundreds of millions of dollars in unfair tax hikes.

�Right now, Cook County households are facing the beginning of the home heating season, just as they�re dealing with higher electric rates,� Quinn said in a news conference in the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago. �Instead of trying to ease the burden on beleaguered ratepayers, Cook County government is trying to pick consumers� pockets with regressive, unfair levies on phone, gas and electric bills.�

Cook County Board President Todd Stroger has proposed a wide-ranging package of utility tax hikes that would hit consumers on their telephone, electric and natural gas bills. Under the proposal, the county would slap a $4 monthly fee on every phone line in the household � including cell phones and DSL lines. The County also would impose a 0.6 cent tax per kilowatt hour of electricity used, and 5.2 cents per therm of natural gas.

The new phone tax alone could cost many families hundreds of dollars each year,. The tax on electricity usage would add about 5% to the average bill, and natural gas bills would spike by 5 to 7%.

Quinn, who spearheaded the creation of the Citizens Utility Board in 1983, is a longtime consumer advocate who has organized successful protests against a wide array of unfair utility and property tax proposals.

Most recently, Quinn led the statewide protest against the electric rate hikes that slapped Cook County consumers with increases of 25% to 100% in their monthly bills. Responding to consumer fury, ComEd and its parent company, Exelon, were forced to return $800 million in rebates and rate relief to northeastern Illinois ratepayers over the next four years.