If you found a quarter in your couch cushions today, you’d probably think very little of it. But for 44 years, Michigan families have been making that tiny investment — roughly 25 cents per year, built right into monthly utility rates — to fund an important defense against unchecked rate hikes.
This small change feeds the Utility Consumer Representation Fund (UCRF). It isn’t a taxpayer-funded handout; it is money provided by ratepayers to ensure that nonprofit watchdogs have the expert witnesses needed to challenge utility giants in court.
Today, that defense fund is under attack. A new legislative proposal in House Bill 5710 seeks to eliminate this fund. The result would be that opposition groups would be unable to intervene in electric and gas rate case filings in which utilities ask regulators to hike rates, often by hundreds of millions of dollars per year. The participation of these groups allows arguments against the rate hikes to be heard by the regulators at the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC), and those arguments inform the MPSC’s ultimate decision on the proposed rate increases. But this bill would silence those voices.
To understand what’s at stake, look at a recent DTE Electric case. The utility originally requested an increase that would have pushed their total revenue up by nearly $575 million. Nonprofit experts fought back. Their intervention helped slash the requested hike by more than $240 million. For residential customers, that pushback saves $144 million every single year.
That is a staggering return on a 25-cent investment, and it represents just one rate case in one year. DTE and Consumers Energy have been filing rate hike requests on a nearly annual basis for several years now.
Despite this success, proponents of the bill argue that ratepayers should depend solely on the attorney general’s office. The bill would eliminate funding for the Utility Consumer Participation Board (UCPB), the governor-appointed board that distributes dollars for intervening groups, including the Citizens Utility Board of Michigan, while slightly increasing funding for the AG to participate in rate cases. But the AG’s office is already stretched thin, and represents just one voice of opposition to the utilities. Eliminating the nonprofit experts would be like a football game where the utility-sponsored “offense” has all 11 players on the field, while ratepayers’ “defense” is limited to only six players.
But here is the real kicker: while utilities try to sideline the defense, they are making residents pay for their team’s players. Right now, a monthly bill already includes the cost for the utilities’ own army of lawyers and experts they use to push for rate hikes.
Who benefits from a game this lopsided? Not the families struggling with some of the highest energy costs in the Midwest. The only winners are the utilities, who are clearly tired of losing millions in potential profit to experts who actually read the fine print of their thousand-page rate requests.
We shouldn’t be raiding the defense fund that’s been built over 44 years. Lansing should be protecting “couch cushion” investments and looking for ways to stop making residents pay for the utility’s legal fees.
Don’t let Lansing silence one of the key voices looking out for your wallet. Demand that lawmakers change the law so that monthly rates no longer include paying for the utilities’ own lawyers to lobby for rate increases.
Kelly Jo Kitchen is the president of the Citizens Utility Board of Michigan, a residential ratepayer advocacy group, and a retired public school teacher.
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Proposed bill threatens Michigan’s utility ratepayer defense fund | Opinion
Reporting by Kelly Jo Kitchen, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
