The Texas Public Utility Commission, which sets electricity rates for the state and allows adjustments for fuel costs, has recently proposed amendments to its procedural rules that would limit consumer advocate input into potentially abusive rate changes.
Prior to any rate changes, the Commission holds public hearings where experts for the utility companies present highly technical reports drawn from their own data. Representatives of consumer groups can participate in these hearings, but they typically advance consumer interests by challenging the data and assumptions presented by the industry's experts.
The Commission has proposed to limit the amount of demands for information that consumer advocates can make of utility companies and the number of written question they can submit at public hearings.
In an op-ed for yesterday's Austin-American Statesman, CPR Scholar and University of Texas School of Law professor Tom McGarity lays out the potential problems for consumers if the rule goes forward. McGarity notes:
Most of us take for granted the large role that electricity plays in our daily lives until we receive our monthly electric bills. And most of us are unaware of the role that consumer advocates play in keeping those bills as low as possible. But we had best pay attention to a battle that is brewing between consumer advocates and the electric utility industry in the Texas Public Utility Commission, because it has serious implications for the rates that we will pay for electricity in the future.
Lawyers for the electric utility companies have persuaded the commission to propose amendments to its procedural rules that will seriously impede consumer advocates’ efforts to keep utility companies honest in most of its hearings related to electricity rates.
To read the full piece, click here.
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Erin Kesler | March 3, 2015
The Texas Public Utility Commission, which sets electricity rates for the state and allows adjustments for fuel costs, has recently proposed amendments to its procedural rules that would limit consumer advocate input into potentially abusive rate changes. Prior to any rate changes, the Commission holds public hearings where experts for the utility companies present highly technical reports drawn from their own data. […]
Daniel Farber | March 2, 2015
The Republicans’ choice for head of the CBO, Keith Hall, spent some time at a libertarian think tank reportedly funded by the Koch brothers, where he wrote about the effect of regulation on employment. Hall argued that regulations cause unemployment (include indirect effects because of price changes), and that the costs of unemployment should be included in regulatory cost-benefit analysis. […]
Matthew Freeman | March 1, 2015
Last December, the Justice Department announced the indictiment of the owner/head pharmacist, the supervising pharmacist, and 12 others associated with the New England Compounding Compounding Center. The 131-count indictment, which included 25 charges of second-degree murder, grew out of a 2012 outbreak of fungal meningitis caused by contaminated drugs manufactured by the company. More than […]
James Goodwin | February 27, 2015
In keeping with an apparent effort to hold an antiregulatory hearing on any and all days ending in “y,” Congressional Republicans have teed up yet another humdinger for Monday, March 2. That’s when the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Administrative law will take a closer look at three more antiregulatory bills […]
Matt Shudtz | February 24, 2015
This week, the Maryland General Assembly will review new legislation that could help ensure safer workplaces in the state’s construction industry. The proposal, which is a type of “responsible contracting” legislation similar to other policies being tested out in states and municipalities across the country, would require companies that put in bids for work on […]
James Goodwin | February 24, 2015
A clock hangs in Room 342 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building—the room where tomorrow at 10:00 am the Republican leadership of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee will convene its first antiregulatory circus hearing of the new Congress. Below that clock, the hearing will play out according to a now-familiar script: the […]
Victor Flatt | February 23, 2015
Today I joined a group more than 40 environmental law professors and clinicians from institutions around the nation in a joint letter to the University of North Carolina System Board of Governors urging that they reject a recommendation to shutter the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, housed at the University of North Carolina Law […]
Matt Shudtz | February 19, 2015
Our intrepid colleague Celeste Monforton, who writes at the Pump Handle blog, recently passed along a neat example of a tool that we wrote about in our Winning Safer Workplaces manual. Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor released a report on the state’s regulatory protections for meatpacking workers. As we noted in the Winning Safer […]
James Goodwin | February 17, 2015
Last week, Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) continued the parade of anti-regulatory bills resurrected from past sessions of Congress by introducing in their respective chambers the Sunshine for Regulatory Decrees and Settlements Act of 2015 (SRDSA). While all of these anti-regulatory bills are categorically terrible, the SRDSA really needs to be […]