An Update on What you need to know about Community Choice Aggregate (CCA)
By James E. Horn

President Ronald Reagan once said that the most terrifying thing we can hear is: “I’m from the guvmint and I’m here to help you.

Consumers must be beware

An phony offering or promising (with abundant sweet talk, fuzzy math, and vague promises) to bring reduced electric bills Community Choice Aggregates is commonly known as a Regional Council of Governments (RCOG) or something similarly named.

A Regional Council of Governments (RCOG) derives from or is subordinate to a state Association of Councils of Government (COG), which is subordinate to the National Council of Governments. Nationwide, they are an entity of officials who have not been elected but who hold considerable sway and control over our lives. And that is ever expanding at the expense of unaware citizens who pay for these entities to increasingly intervene in the lives of we-the-people.

A Regional Council of Governments is NOT benign.
A Regional Council of Governments is NOT elected.
A Regional Council of Governments is NOT accountable.
A Regional Council of Governments takes citizens’ money and uses it as they please without accountability to we-the-people. They do as they please.

Unable to indefinitely raise taxes without accountability, Councils of Government have been established to generate income for various nefarious projects that taxpayers would normally reject or demand solid information on before passing a referendum or a tax increase.

A COG is an end-run around taxpayers and accountability. A COG is another unelected tier of bureaucratic meddling in the affairs of consumers, aka rate payers, aka citizens, aka tax payers.
No COG has ever been authorized by taxpayers. A COG is a creation of bureaucrats and elected officials to provide money for a variety of projects and benefits NOT authorized by taxpayers. Your elected city and county officials appoint the RCOG officials and often expect something in return.

Many of those expenditures are of a very questionable nature and some of them just benefit the politicians who support COGs or are some who are even employed in one manner or another by a COG where the politicians and bureaucrats receive generous stipends and allowances that they do not have to account for (the personal expenditure of those many thousands of dollars). In other words, some of those funds are a generous slush fund. Government slush funds are illegal, but that’s the nature of a COG.

The intent in this instance is to place a RCOG in a position between electric utilities and we-the-people, the rate payers. Yes, ANOTHER bureaucracy of unaccountable administrators to make decisions that will (not can, but will) eventually be costly to rate payers – and to tell us how to live. Do we need more high paid useless bureaucrats telling us how to live?

None of the COG officials are engineers, technicians, experts in power production or distribution, of anything else of that nature. They are lawyers (liars) and accountants and their mission is to steal money legally and pay themselves and their supporters handsomely.

We all know and understand that a bunch of highly paid bureaucrats not being held accountable can never, ever be efficient. Efficiency is not the nature of, nor the driving force behind any COG unless it involves stealing citizens’ money. Their operations are designed to just place a bigger burden on rate payers and taxpayers to do little of anything truly or beneficial to or for we-the-people.

COG members are NOT elected, and cannot be held accountable by taxpayers, citizens, ratepayers, residents, or consumers. Its members are appointed by politicians.

If anyone was to sit down and study their founding documents, you would be pulling your hair out after ten pages of equivocation, double speak, and obfuscation that would lead an honest attorney to suicide.

The contract city or community’s elected officials grant monopoly power to the COG to regulate electricity – for about thirty years. Any opting out, cancellation, or getting rid of this bad deal would cost every individual rate payer and taxpayer thousands of dollars.

When or if the opportunity presents itself, never agree or sign on with any COG’s electric power “deal” – save yourself grief. Do we need more costly, ineffective burdens?

THERE IS A SUCKER BORN EVERY MINUTE!

Avoid being a sucker!
Citizens need to go to their City Councils about this need to ask questions and then demand clear answers, not flim-flam doubletalk: The “choice” part of an electric power CCA is that instead of just paying the one relatively stable amalgamated rate afforded by electricity providers, consumers could choose from various “cleaner” options to meet their electric energy needs.
Ask: Can individual consumers choose, or is it an imposed choice?
Ask: Who verifies the sources of electricity?
ASK: Can we receive normal (fossil fuel) electricity and be charged the higher rate for renewable electricity? How would we ever know if we were being cheated or not?
Ask: Will the CCA service street lights, downed power poles, etc.?
ASK: Who reviews the justification for (eventually – guaranteed) increased rates set by a CCA, or are they arbitrarily set by a “committee” of unelected bureaucrats?

Reports (available on the internet) from communities throughout the US indicate that as a CCA is implemented, rates go down by about 2%. That looks good, but after about six years, their rates rise dramatically – much higher than the electric provider would charge.

What about the growing number of self-sufficient or nearly self-sufficient consumers who are now using solar collectors, batteries, generators or other systems and emerging technology for their electricity? Will they face having to deal with this outfit demanding money from them?

The new CCA “agency” must compete with the local utility company for customers. Government can make everyone their customer for a moment, but then they have to keep them. So, what’s their pitch? Is the energy they’re selling greener than, say, the local electricity provider? Is it cheaper? How much cheaper and for how long? What are the guarantees? Is it managed by superior experts in the energy industry or just another tier of bureaucrats?

Consumers will reportedly be given a choice as to the source of their electricity under the CCA. How is this accomplished? Will there be a meter telling them that the source of their electricity is wind power, nuclear, hydroelectric, fossil fueled, or solar. The CCA is incapable of identifying the sources of power flowing into your home.

Hydro power is the cheapest and most efficient source of electricity followed by fossil fueled, and nuclear, then wind, and solar.

Wind and solar are enormously expensive (100-200% more costly than other forms of generating electricity) as wind farms and solar farms require intensive and very costly maintenance, repair, and replacement/upgrade operations.

People are told that renewable wind and solar is a green technology. Windmills and solar farms absolutely devastate wildlife killing birds by the thousands, either by chopping them up, wounding them to die slow deaths, or literally frying them if they venture into solar farms.
Get this: Electric power companies are not permitted to reveal essential information to consumers. The CCA’s have put gag orders on electric utilities so that we-the-people are not permitted to know the truth.

The bottom line for we-the-consumers is to know how much you’re going to get screwed by the CCA when and if you sign up. If a consumer with “green” notions signs up for “clean” solar or wind generated electricity, they will pay much higher rates than consumers who sign up for hydro, fossil fueled, or nuclear power generation.

At the end of the day, Community Choice Aggregates offer nothing truly beneficial to we-the-people over the long run.

CCA’s carry a strong stench of ENRON and other costly failed scams that have cost we-the-people millions of dollars.

Are you ready for another rip-off right out of your pocket?

Yogi Berra coined: “It’s déjà vu all over again.”