So this year NSP plans on demanding an 11% rate hike for residential customers (while lowering corporate usage rates) and now they want to force the good people of Nova Scotia to foot the bill for a new 60 million dollar HQ on the site of the old power plant on the waterfront (HFX side).
It seems to me that the building of a new HQ would be considered part of OPERATING COSTS…which should be taken from annual income before profits are declared and doled out to the shareholders.
Years of profit for the shareholders (instead of repair and infrastructure improvement) and continued lowering of corporate rates on top of executives being paid 44% over industry standard (while laying off linesmen and short-changing lesser employees of benefits and humane working hours) have led to a situation that relies solely on middle income families to support the decrepitude of NSP…
It’s time Nova Scotians tell NSP to stuff it and start operating like a real business, operating costs come from your projected budget that relies on the GROSS INCOME…not by trying to impose unrealistic costs on your customer base.
This article appears in Jul 3-9, 2008.
It’s exactly this kind of thing that makes me think we should either open things up to competition or take back NSP as a public company.
But our esteemed politicians thought it a good idea to make it private and they love the tax revenues. NSP and NSLC would both do well with competition. NSP (private) = gouging monopoly. NSLC (public, sort of) = gouging monopoly. In both cases RodMac and the Cons are misspending the millions they collect in taxes via both avenues.
No doubt about it–the CEO or whatever the fuck it is is a total asshole, a filthy vulture preying on those people who work two and three jobs to make ends meet and help pay this bastard’s salary. But, people like this fuckhat have no conscience and sleep well in their high-end beds at night whilst others freeze during the winter.
You’re bitching about a misleading story that was incorrectly written by a doofus journalist who doesn’t have a clue about how power rates work. there is no guarantee that a new building will lead to a rate increase, just as there is no guarantee that NSP staying where they are wouldn’t lead to a rate increase. Don’t believe everything you read in the paper.
NSP/Emera currently leases the space in Scotia Square for a premuim rate…have for the last 8 years or so. They OWN the old production plant on the waterfront; they aren’t rebuilding, they’re renovating the space to accomodate NSP and Emera employees being moved out of Scotia Square. Plus, they will be leasing out space in the building to new tenants once it is renovated, thus creating revenues to offset the costs. This is all included in the operating costs of the business; the media just likes to play socialist ragtime every time a major corporation announces ANYTHING.As for the NSLC, please explain to me how someone would want them to “do well with competition”. Today’s news shows that liquor sales have increased since last year; you want competition to lower prices so MORE liquor is sold? How is that healthy? I guess the people who cry that they can’t pay their power bills are all shopping at the LC instead, then crying “woe is me” in their full glass of beer every time the power bill comes in. Interesting.
lol my friends keep saying they would like competition and I keep telling them its not going to happen – the province is too small to support another major company who would probably operate the same way anyway with oil prices such as they are – lower our dependance on oil and the price will go down untill then i’m not going to complain about high anything because I can understand why they are high
The competition I would like to see, is for the government to allow wind producers to sell power directly to consumers. There are several wind farms in operation now in Nova Scotia, the businesses that own them are doing well, but are forced to sell power to NSP who limits the amount of power that comes from wind and still charges us extreme prices for power. If the wind energy producers could sell direct, we might see wind power provide more than the meagre percentage of our power that it does today, and that would be a good thing.