themail.gif (3487 bytes)

August 1, 2012

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

###############

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.

###############

Response to Dorothy Brizill
Dennis Sobin, dennis@safestreetsarts.org 

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).

###############

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]

###############

Darrin Sobin
John Chelen, john@chelen.net

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.

###############

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.

###############

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.”

###############

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.

###############

themail@dcwatch is an E-mail discussion forum that is published every Wednesday and Sunday. To change the E-mail address for your subscription to themail, use the Update Profile/Email address link below in the E-mail edition. To unsubscribe, use the Safe Unsubscribe link in the E-mail edition. An archive of all past issues is available at http://www.dcwatch.com/themail.

All postings should be submitted to themail@dcwatch.com, and should be about life, government, or politics in the District of Columbia in one way or another. All postings must be signed in order to be printed, and messages should be reasonably short — one or two brief paragraphs would be ideal — so that as many messages as possible can be put into each mailing.

 


Send mail with questions or comments to webmaster@dcwatch.com
Web site copyright ©DCWatch (ISSN 1546-4296)