Oct. 7, 2009
I hate to be cynical, but, hey, I am who I am.
Chances are, Monday night’s hearing on skyrocketing PG&E rates — tea-party-thrilling as it was — will go nowhere.
State Sen. Dean Florez has promised more hearings and no doubt he’ll deliver. But if the residents of this county don’t get together and continue pushing this issue, it will fizzle out just like all the other times.
I cannot impress upon you enough how important it is for each individual who’s fed up with his bills to get involved and stay involved.
If you rely one “someone else” to fix this it will slip through the cracks — again.
I know, I’ve seen it happen.
We had similar hearings here in 1979 and 1995.
The issues were exactly the same. People were just as spitting mad and PG&E and California Public Utilities Commission reps were just as infuriating in their placid response to the angry crowds.
As a side note I found it telling that PG&E didn’t send their top people — not even close — to Monday’s hearing. And the reps who were there didn’t bother to prep enough to answer basic questions like why the utility wanted to introduce a rate hike just before summer. That alone spoke volumes about the utility’s arrogance.
I wasn’t the only one appalled by some of the answers, or non-answers, given by PG&E and the two PUC reps.
“Hang ‘em all!” shouted one man at Monday night’s meeting, echoing another man who hollered “Lynch ’em!” during the 1979 hearing, according to reports.
I wasn’t here in the 1970s but I covered the 1995 hearings. It was exactly the same scenario: escalating bills even as residents reduced consumption.
Back then Cassandra Ballestero carried the torch for the rest of the county, picking apart bills and researching rate structures.
She got two hearings in Bakersfield, one chaired by a PUC commissioner. More than 200 people showed up and vented.
Ballestero also got a second more formal hearing with a PUC administrative law judge where she argued our baseline allotment (a small amount of energy we get for lower rates) should be increased because of the harsh climate in Kern County.
By the way, our baseline amount in Ballestero’s day was 498 kilowatt hours per month during summer at 11.9 cents per hour. Every hour of usage above that was 13.7 cents per kilowatt hour.
Now, we get 582 kilowatt hours per month in summer at 11.5 cents per hour and are charged 13.1 cents for going up to 130 percent above baseline; 25.9 cents for up to 200 percent over; 37.8 cents for up to 300 percent over; and 44 cents for anything over 300 percent above baseline.
The commission turned her down and she appealed to the California Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case in 1997.
As another side note, when the PUC admin law judge recommended against Ballestero’s request, she repeated information straight from PG&E which was known to be false. I always thought that seemed a bit cozy.
Interestingly, two sisters testified at Monday’s hearing that when bills for their 700-square-foot apartments went through the roof ($500 for one apartment for one month!) they each spoke with the same PG&E manager. Unsatisfied, they tried to complain to the PUC only to have the same manager claim he was in charge of PUC investigations.
Oh my, now that’s a bit beyond cozy.
Ballestero was home nursing a broken foot or she’d have been at Monday night’s hearing, she told me.
“Oh no, I haven’t lost my fight,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve been following everything from home.”
Ballestero learned a lot over the three years she battled PG&E and I think it’s relevant for us today.
“My phone rang off the hook with people wanting me to tell the PUC their story but that doesn’t work,” she said. “It takes thousands of people, all of us us, calling the PUC and keeping the pressure on.”
That means you need to keep track of your bills and your usage, call PG&E, complain to the PUC, contact TURN (a watchdog organization) and stay up on what’s happening.
We have a good opportunity now to effect change. Don’t let this one fall through the cracks.
Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com
COMPLAIN COMPLAIN COMPLAIN!
If you get a power bill that’s out of whack, do something, ask questions and report problems. Here's how:
TURN
First and foremost, go to TURN's (The Utility Reform Network) website at http://www.turn.org and look at the top right side of the page where it says "FILE A COMPLAINT." Click there.
You can automatically file a complaint with the Public Utilities Commission and TURN will have the complaint on file to follow up for you.
Contact State Sen. Dean Florez
Call his Bakersfield office at 395-2620
To file a complaint directly with the PUC:
www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/forms/Complaints
The main office is in San Francisco:
505 Van Ness Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94102
Tel: 415-703-2782
Fax: 415-703-1758
For the Los Angeles office:
320 West Fourth St., Ste. 500
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Tel: 213-5760-7000
Fax: 213-576-7007
Contact PG&E
24-hour customer service number 800-PGE-5000. People can also log onto pge.com and click on Contact Us at the top right of the page, which will take them to a form that allows e-mail communication. PG&E also offers customer support lines in languages other than English.
Spanish: http://pge.com/espanol 800-660-6789
Chinese: http://pge.com/chinese 800-893-9555
Vietnamese 800-298-8438
TDD/TTY (speech/hearing-impaired) 800-652-4712
Telecommunications Devices for the Deaf and Other Language Services: http://pge.com/myhome/ customerservice/other/ languageservices/index.shtml
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