Paying the Bills
Dear Rate-Payers:
Gabe Goldberg, below, asks a critical question that has to be
answered as we deal with questions of power reliability in the future.
Who will pay the bills? Normally, that isn’t a hard question to answer.
A company’s owners pays its bills. For a publicly held company, its
shareholders pay the bills. If the company has to improve its operations
or modernize its structure, the people who own the company bear the cost
of doing that, in the expectation that they will eventually recoup their
costs from increased business from their customers. Public utilities are
considered to be natural monopolies, however. We don’t expect them to be
governed entirely by the rules of the marketplace. Shareholders still
invest in the companies in the hope of making a profit, but customers
don’t have the ability to shop around among companies for the best
prices. For the privilege of operating as monopolies, the companies
agree that governments will have the right to set their rates.
The shareholders hire the managers of their companies, and they judge
how well the managers operate the companies and please their customers.
But the government that regulates a monopoly also has to judge how well
that monopoly is operated. It can’t just pass on all the company’s costs
to its customers, and reimburse its shareholders, hold shareholders
harmless, if the company is not managed well. As citizens, we have to
judge how well our government’s regulators are managing monopolies in
our interest.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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Why Does It Take Pepco So Long to Restore
Power
Ann Loikow,
aloikow@verizon.net
DC residents need to demand accountability from the mayor, council
and DC Public Service Commission about DC’s lack regulation of Pepco and
its notorious unreliability record. It came out at the recent hearing on
the derecho outages that Pepco only has 123 line mechanics and that only
29 are experienced enough to restore service directly from a pole to a
house. In 1993, Pepco had 209 linemen, despite serving significantly
fewer residents in the area at that time. Many of these contract linemen
are from across the country and need several days, under the best
circumstances, to get here before they can even begin repairing the
damage to the lines from storms like the recent derecho or Hurricane
Isabel. This downsizing of its unionized workforce has been going on for
over a decade and sure explains why we have such long power outages in
DC. The two major outages at my house (2003, Hurricane Isabel, and
2012’s derecho) were both five to seven days long, and I wasn’t alone.
The Washington Post recently published an interesting chart that
showed by electric company (Pepco, Dominion, and BG&E) how many
customers were affected by the recent outages and how fast the electric
companies restored their customers’ power. For the first three to four
days, the number restored in DC was minuscule, basically a flat line,
while Dominion and BG&E were restoring power to tens of thousands. I
know that personally since Dominion showed up in the Falls Church
neighborhood where my husband grew up, which sustained major damage to
the power infrastructure, within two days of the storm and had the power
back on the next day. It took that long for the Pepco assessors to reach
Cleveland Park/Van Ness just to see the damage along Reno Road, a major
road that was closed for days.
The public — and particularly our elected officials who freely take
Pepco’s campaign contributions and resist appointing experienced
regulators — and the Public Service Commission that doesn’t say a peep
or do a thing about the dramatic unreliability of Pepco’s service, need
to understand that this is the necessary consequence of Pepco’s
deliberate policy to break its union and contract out its linemen. The
contractors, who don’t know Pepco’s system and who may not be as expert
at the employees they replace, need several days to get here, causing
most major outages to be at least three to five days long. Remember,
food in a refrigerator or freezer without power lasts at most two days.
On 100 degree days with equally high humidity, as we all experienced
this month, this means any food one buys either molds or rots within a
day or so. This effectively means that those without power must eat out,
if they can find an open restaurant and if they can get gas to get there
if a restaurant is not in walking distance. Those who are elderly, ill,
disabled, or poor may be left to swelter without access to adequate food
if they don’t have someone to bring them food or can’t get to or afford
eating at a restaurant three times a day for days.
The result is that Pepco’s customers are subject to millions of
dollars in losses collectively so Pepco can run a less reliable system
and pay outrageous salaries to its executives. Pepco’s CEO is paid $7.2
million a year so he waste our money trying to make us believe he runs a
reliable and efficient utility. I suspect his fellow executives have
similarly outrageous salaries. The Public Service Commission and Pepco’s
shareholders should demand that Pepco’s CEO’s salary be decreased from
$7.2 million to no more than $200,000, more than enough for anyone to
live on. That would free up seven million dollars that could be used to
hire 117 more linemen (assuming an annual salary of about $60,000),
which would just about double the number they currently have! Reducing
other executives’ salaries similarly would bring some accountability to
utility regulation in DC and allow Pepco to rebuild its staff so it
could really could provide reliable electrical service as required by
law (but not so far by our regulator, the DC Public Service Commission).
Pepco no longer produces power as it sold off its power plants years
ago. Its only reason for being is to transmit power produced by others,
and in that job it has just flunked every test. We deserve and need to
demand better. For more information, read: “Is Union Busting to Blame
for Power Outages in DC?” by Mike Elk,
http://tinyurl.com/c6pt6ap,
and Tim Craig’s article “A simple message to Pepco at DC hearing: ‘Shame
on you,’
http://tinyurl.com/cnug3ef.
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I would like to thank Dorothy Brizill for her commentary about my
son, Assistant DC Attorney General Darrin Sobin, and I [themail, July
29]. As Dorothy revealed in her piece, my son over the years has come
under intense [sic] because of the Sobin name and the family’s
commitment to the ideals of human freedom, sometimes manifested in
controversial ways (such as working aggressively toward
decriminalization of victimless offenses, including pornography,
prostitution, and marijuana use). Despite such scrutiny Darrin has never
been accused of dishonesty or an ethical breach of any kind. Therefore,
he is the ideal choice to advise the DC Board of Ethics and Government
Accountability.
While in my case I may have blundered as the first generation Sobin
pioneering our family’s commitment to privacy rights and personal
freedom, I believe I have learned from my mistakes. I invite readers to
visit the current web sites of two organizations I direct to judge for
themselves. One of these organizations is Safe Streets Arts Foundation ( http://www.SafeStreetsArts.org)
and the other is Citizens Against Police Entrapment (http://www.CAPE-DC.com).
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Ethics and the District Government
Katherine Kelley,
katherinevkelley@gmail.com
While this publication has done a good job of reporting on the work
and problems of the District government, your July 29 posting, “Sex,
Pornography and Ethics in DC,” was a departure from your usual
thoughtful work. You described a city attorney working with the new
government ethics board as the son of someone who sold pornography and
engaged in other criminal activity, and note that while the attorney was
a teenager he got caught up in his family’s activities, for which he was
placed on probation. After reporting on his work with the board you
said, “And you wonder why, when it comes to fighting corruption, nothing
really changes for the better in DC.” These comments create an
incomplete picture of the attorney involved and deflect focus away from
the important ethics issues that the new board and the government face.
I have worked with the attorney, Darrin Sobin, intermittently for
many years. He is thoughtful, thorough, and professional. In the
approximately twenty years that he has been practicing law, Mr. Sobin
clerked for a federal judge, and worked for the DC Bar Counsel and in
private practice before coming to work for the District. He has given
training on ethics issues for the National Association of Attorneys
General. One of his criminal convictions was expunged from his record,
and he received a presidential pardon for the other.
When dealing with government ethics issues, the devil is often in the
details. While you have often taken the lead in the hard work of poring
over reports and identifying troublesome details, your recent posting
was a surprising departure, focusing on salacious unrelated matters and
unfairly suggesting that Mr. Sobin is something other than a qualified,
dedicated attorney who is up to the task of providing sound legal
advice. I hope that you will return to your tradition of good work, and
that you will apologize to Mr. Sobin.
[Ms. Kelley is a colleague of Mr. Sobin. She is an assistant DC
Attorney General. — Gary Imhoff]
###############
Dorothy Brizill’s recent post “Sex, Pornography, and Ethics in DC” [themail,
July 29] is both baffling and infuriating. I’ve come to trust and
respect Dorothy’s sense of justice so I wonder how she could have made
what appears to be a terrible mistake.
Perhaps I overlooked some essential piece of information in the post,
and I admit I know nothing about Darrin Sobin and don’t think I’ve ever
met him. But I see nothing in what Dorothy wrote that provides any
specific information about how he’s operated as a lawyer and the
decisions he’s made as a public servant. Must children suffer the sins
of their fathers to the seventh generation? Must a man be attacked for a
mistake made over twenty years ago despite what looks like an admirable
turnaround in his life? This is all the more pitiful since it involves
supposed “crimes” defined under a smarmy and repressive criminal justice
system that has led to the destruction of so many families in DC.
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Sex, Pornography, and Ethics, Part 2
Dorothy Brizill,
dorothy@dcwatch.com
On Wednesday, in Part 1 of this article, I wrote that District
Attorney General Darrin Sobin was a convicted felon and the son of DC’s
porn king, Dennis Sobin, and that he had recently been named the Ethics
Counsel for the District government and had also assumed a major role in
helping the DC Board of Ethics and Government Accountability (BEGA) get
established and operational by October 1. I wrote about Sobin not to be
titillating, or just to resurrect his troubled past, but because for
most DC residents the foremost issue is corruption in the District
government. As a result, how and who policies the District’s ethics laws
and regulations is critically important if we, as a city, are ever to be
able to address the culture of corruption that permeates the government.
I was, therefore, disappointed by some of the comments and criticisms
made about my piece.
Because of his position as the District’s Ethics Counsel and advisor
to the BEGA, I believe DC residents have a right to know about Mr.
Sobin’s background and qualifications. Indeed, the issues I have raised
are the same legitimate concerns the District’s Committee on Admissions
had to grapple with at the DC Court of Appeals when it reviewed his
application to the DC Bar.
The issue isn’t whether or not I believe in rehabilitation, or
whether Mr. Sobin is currently estranged from his father. It is whether
we take ethics reforms seriously in the District of Columbia, and
whether we have a higher standard for those who would assume such
critical positions. In addition to what has been sent to themail, two
reporters tweeted to criticize my raising the issue, and to say that it
was despicable and was not relevant. I assume that in the future, then,
that they will apply that standard to their own writings, and will
refrain from mentioning any legal problems that have been faced by
Councilmembers Barry, Thomas, and Kwame Brown. The issue isn’t manners,
or refraining from mentioning anybody’s embarrassing past; it is
standards.
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Underground Power Lines? At What Cost? At
Whose Cost?
Gabe Goldberg, gabe at gabegold dot com
Here’s a letter I wrote, just printed in Falls Church News-Press.
Different place from DC, different population density, infrastructure,
etc. Still, seems relevant to issue of undergrounding DC’s power — it
will be expensive and disruptive an in urban setting, and who’ll pay for
it? I’m not opposed to undergrounding — after the derecho my power was
off for days — but costs are dramatic. A friend’s Arlington block
received an estimate of $10,000 per house for undergrounding their
block’s power lines.
“Dear Editor: Is it really FCNP policy to avoid providing balanced
facts in ‘news’ articles and surveys? Or even to interview sources which
might contradict FCNP’s usual one-sided ‘reporting’? I’m no Dominion
Power fan — I’ve been corresponding with them about recent shortcomings
— but they do provide information on the cost of undergrounding power
lines. Here’s a link to interesting information on how power is restored
—
http://tinyurl.com/86mqo56
— and this link —
http://tinyurl.com/8654t46
— gives information on overhead vs. underground electric lines.
It includes these inconvenient facts: in 2005, a study by the Virginia
State Corporation Commission found that overhead-to-underground
conversion would have ‘tremendous costs’ that would make ‘a
comprehensive statewide effort appear to be unreasonable.’
“The study, conducted in response to a request from the General
Assembly, found the cost of placing existing overhead electric,
telephone, and cable television lines could approach $94 billion. For
electric lines alone, the cost was estimated to be $83.3 billion; the
conversion cost per mile was approximately $800,000. A statewide
conversion project would impose an additional yearly financial burden of
approximately three thousand dollars per electric customer, the study
warned. ‘The costs would be paid ultimately by consumers, either
directly or indirectly, in the form of prices, taxes, or utility rates.’
The project would also cause ‘significant disruptions’ for customers and
‘could take decades to complete,’ the SCC study warned. So I wonder
whether the 68 percent of people voting, ‘Yes, they should have done it
long ago,’ are volunteering their annual share to pay for it, even if
done selectively.”
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CLASSIFIEDS — EVENTS
Public Hearing on Pepco’s Storm Performance,
October 11
Kellie Armstead,
karmstead@psc.dc.gov
The Public Service Commission of the District of Columbia will hold a
public hearing on the June 22 and June 29, outage events and the Pepco
Major Service Outage Reports at 10:00 a.m. on October 11, in the
Commission Hearing Room. At this hearing, Pepco officials will be
required to explain the company’s outage restoration planning,
preparation and performance, and will be questioned by the Commission
concerning those matters. Any person interested in testifying should
sign up for the witness list by contacting the Office of the Commission
Secretary, 1333 H Street, NW, 2nd Floor, West Tower Commission Secretary
or calling 202-626-5100.
The Commission has posted to its web site Major Service Outage
Reports for the June 22 (SO-02-2012-E) and June 29, 2012 (SO-03-2012-E),
outage events, which were required to be filed by Pepco. The June 22
report was filed on July 16 and the June 29 report was filed on July 30.
Both reports were filed pursuant to Section 3601.18 of the District of
Columbia Municipal Regulations. A Major Service Outage occurs when ten
thousand or more District customers are without electric service and
restoration takes more than 24 hours.
The Major Service Outage Reports (SO-02-2012-E and SO-03-2012-E) are
available on the Commission’s web site at
http://www.dcpsc.org/edocket
and in the “Hot Topics” section under Electric Service Reliability. The
reports also are available at the Office of the Commission Secretary,
1333 H Street, NW, 2nd Floor, West Tower, between the hours of 9:00 a.m.
and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. Copies of the Major Service Outage
Reports can be purchased at the Commission at the cost of fifteen cents
($0.15) per page, actual reproduction cost.
Any person desiring to comment on the Major Service Outage Reports
shall file comments no later than thirty days from the date of Public
Notice. Reply comments shall be filed no later than forty-five days from
the date of Public Notice. Written comments should be sent to Brinda
Westbrook-Sedgwick, Secretary, Public Service Commission of the District
of Columbia, 1333 H Street, NW, 2nd Floor, West Tower, Washington, DC
20005, or filed electronically on the Commission’s web site at
http://www.dcpsc.org. To be
notified about this hearing, as well as future Commission hearings, you
may enroll through the Commission’s web site in subscription services
for Commission Public Meetings. Subscribers are notified by E-mail about
all Commission Public Meetings. To enroll on-line, please visit
http://dcpsc.org/public_meeting/subscription/subscription_info.asp.
If you have further questions or need additional information, please
contact the Commission at 626-5100 or visit the Commission’s web site at
http://www.dcpsc.org.
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