OPC asks Maryland regulators to enforce Washington Gas’s promise of lower rates due to its merger with AltaGas
BALTIMORE – The Public Service Commission erroneously and unlawfully rejected the Office of People’s Counsel’s request to require that Washington Gas demonstrate, in its most recent rate case, that the company met its promise of lower customer rates from cost savings resulting from the company’s 2018 acquisition by Canadian-based AltaGas, OPC said in a filing last week.
OPC is seeking reconsideration of a Commission order that declined to establish the proceedings necessary to determine whether Washington Gas ratepayers realized cost savings the company promised would result from the merger with AltaGas. The Commission’s refusal conflicts with an earlier Commission ruling in the same rate case, filed in 2023, which found that the utility’s 2018 merger-related commitment to pass along cost savings for five years remained in effect, the filing pointed out.
“All of Maryland’s utilities have been gobbled up by large utility holding companies with big impacts on Maryland’s utility customers,” said Maryland People’s Counsel David S. Lapp. “When a utility makes promises to win regulatory approval for a merger, it is essential that those promises are enforced. Unfortunately, that has not happened so far in this case.”
To win regulatory approval in 2018, Washington Gas promised that its merger with AltaGas would reduce customer rates by at least $4 million over five years to reflect purported savings from sharing certain corporate functions with other AltaGas subsidiaries—such as work related to legal, regulatory compliance, business development, supply chain, and information technology. That commitment was still in effect when the utility filed its last rate case in 2023—in which the company proposed to recover from its customers a substantial increase in corporate costs—but the Commission has not enforced the merger condition and recently declined to set a hearing to ensure compliance.
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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