People’s Counsel: Utilities’ Proposal to End Pandemic Protections for Residential Customers Should Be Rejected
BALTIMORE – Critical safeguards to limit service terminations and to require utilities to flexibly address customer arrearages should remain in place, the Office of People’s Counsel told the Public Service Commission in a filing on Friday. Low and moderate-income residential customers continue to suffer economically from the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation, making the continuation of current policies necessary, OPC’s filing said.
“Now is not the time to revert back to pre-pandemic payment and collection policies,” said People’s Counsel David S. Lapp. “Customers are hurting, and the Commission should not leave them vulnerable to individual utility collections and cutoff policies. The policies the Commission adopted in 2020 give customers critical protections and negotiating power to maintain essential utility services when they have not been able to manage their bills.”
The filing of the State’s major gas and electric utilities asks the Commission to end policies established in 2020 on residential utility payment and collection policies that were intended to prevent customers from going without gas or electric service at a time when they were struggling to pay their bills. The customer protections include a longer notice period before service terminations; minimum repayment terms of 12 or 24 months, depending on whether the customer receives State energy assistance; a prohibition on utility down-payment requirements; a prohibition on utility refusals to negotiate or enter into payment plans with customers that violated previous payment plans; and arrearage reporting requirements.
“Utility customers are seeing—and will see in coming years—unprecedented increases in their utility bills,” Lapp said. “One gas utility’s commodity price has tripled since the pandemic began—from $0.35/therm in March 2020 to $1.07/therm this month. More importantly, under Commission-approved gas and electric utility spending plans, the customer’s costs for delivering electricity and gas will soar in coming years.”
Despite their request to end customer cut-off protections, the utilities themselves have acknowledged the effect of rate increases in recent filings with the Commission. The full impacts of rate increases the Commission approved in 2020 and 2021 for the State's largest utilities have yet to be implemented. In one current rate proceeding, the utility has proposed to offset rate increases into the future to mitigate the immediate effects of the proposed rate increase. Offsets to approved rate increases mean that customers pay higher costs in subsequent years.
“The Commission should undertake a process to examine whether the policies established for the pandemic should be incorporated into the billing, collection, and payment procedures of all the utilities on a permanent basis,” Lapp said.
The request to end the customer cutoff protections was filed by Baltimore Gas and Electric Company, Potomac Electric Power Company, Delmarva Power & Light Company, The Potomac Edison Company, Washington Gas Light Company, Columbia Gas of Maryland, and Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative.
The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel is an independent state agency that represents Maryland’s residential consumers of electric, natural gas, telecommunications, private water and certain transportation matters before the Public Service Commission, federal regulatory agencies and the courts.
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