Natural gas rates for Chicago and North Shore residents struggling with record bills this winter will drop more than 5 percent next month–a drop in the bucket compared with the much lower rates customers were paying last March.
“The price has come down in the marketplace,” said Desiree Rogers, Peoples Energy’s chief marketing officer. “The demand for natural gas has certainly been lower as the weather has been milder in January and February.”
Peoples Energy announced the March rates for its two gas utilities Tuesday.
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Peoples Gas, which serves about 778,000 residential customers in Chicago, will charge 84.88 cents per therm, the unit by which natural gas usage is measured. A typical home burns about eight therms in a day. The utility said the rate is a drop from February’s 89.92 cents per therm.
North Shore, which serves about 135,200 residential customers in northern Cook and Lake Counties, set its March rate at 84.64 cents per therm. This month, customers are paying 89.9 cents per therm.
Despite the drop, Peoples Gas customers will be paying a rate that is 179 percent higher this March than the rate they paid in the same month last year.
For North Shore customers, the rate will be more than 162 percent higher than in March 2000.
Nicor Gas, which has about 1.7 million customers in northeastern Illinois, has not yet said what its March rate will be.
Meanwhile, about 100 protesters gathered outside Mayor Richard Daley’s office Tuesday to demand relief from soaring gas bills that they say are devastating for the people least able to afford them.
The predominantly Hispanic group, Affordable Power to the People, called on Daley: to suspend the city’s 8 percent tax on gas bills for residential users whose income is at 150 percent of the poverty level or below; to have tax revenues collected since Sept. 1 credited toward payment of gas bills; and to support a law that would limit gas and electric charges to 5 percent of monthly income.
One of the protesters, Sylvia Laguna, said through an interpreter that she earns $196 a week but was hit recently with a month’s bill of $1,025.
“She is just one example of the proof that the heating costs now are unaffordable, and there is no (help) for people who work hard,” said a spokesman for the group. “Guarantee people the right to be warm in the winter and cool in the summer.”
The demonstrators presented a letter to a Daley aide calling for relief.
The mayor has refused to consider eliminating the city’s 8 percent tax, the highest charged by any municipality in the state.
He has said any increase in revenues collected this winter will go to pay the increased cost of heating city-owned buildings and to defray the cost of operating warming centers and providing other weather-related city services. The remainder will go for a variety of relief initiatives designed to help low-and moderate-income families.