A Wallet Lightener

It was a Thanksgiving present no one was looking for and the announcement of which was clearly timed to ensure there wouldn’t be riots in the streets. Connecticut’s baby electric company, United Illuminating, applied for a 30 percent rate hike on residential bills and up to a 50 percent hike for businesses.

The reason? Bids from electric suppliers had increased dramatically. The problem? The bids go directly to the Department of Public Utility Control, which then votes on what it says is the best bid. The public doesn’t get to see the bids, nor the governor, nor the attorney general. No one save for the commissioners and functionaries who serve in the DPUC. It is a process that has the transparency of mud.

The unfortunate part is deregulation was supposed to fix this. Freed from the mundane responsibility of actually producing power (isn’t that what electric utilities are supposed to do?) in 1998, the clearly myopic Legislature saw a day when companies would vie for Connecticut business. Utility producers would line up for the opportunity to provide electricity to residents and businesses in the Nutmeg State, and competition would lower prices. I also think they were hoping in their collective heart of hearts for the return of 37-cent-per-gallon gasoline and bread under a $1.

But if you look at the process and its implementation you can’t help but wonder what legislators were thinking. Not only is the process closed to all but the DPUC, but there seems to be no oversight by anyone! Having sat through the press conference and announcement about the 22 percent CL&P rate hike last year, I can tell you the room is filled with a paternalistic attitude best described as, “We know better than you do, honey.”

In the enabling legislation that freed utilities from actually making anything (and for which they were paid millions, I might add), the utilities did the impossible. They made buying so-called clean “green power” produced from solar, wind and possibly the burning of cow chips more expensive than buying dirty power from natural gas and coal-fired hydroelectric and nuclear plants. In effect, there is actually a surcharge if you buy wind power.

Now, I get that the price of natural gas has gone up. I also understand that while still cheap, coal is still not free, but for the life of me can someone explain how the price of wind went up? When did the sun start charging? Yet thanks to the insane pricing plan currently in effect, the price of “regular” electricity is tied to the price of “green” power. I have nothing but the highest respect and regard for legislators most of the time, but these weasels should be ashamed of themselves.

The answer is actually pretty simple. Go study our Vermont friends. Theirs is the only state in the region that decided not to go down the deregulation highway. From the Vermont Department of Public Service Web site:

Vermont's electric utilities are regulated monopolies that operate under a "certificate of public good" granted by the Vermont Public Service Board. As regulated monopolies, their rates and policies are subject to review by the Vermont Department of Public Service and approval by the Public Service Board.

The result? While our rates in Connecticut have skyrocketed, rates in Vermont have either stayed the same or gone down.

I suspect some DPUC commissioners and clearly some utility company executives hate the thought that the public might find out how they set rates. The DPUC should be required to hold public hearings on rate increases and justify them. Not at 9 in the morning on a Tuesday when only the unemployed and retired can attend, but on successive evenings all around Connecticut. You want to work for the DPUC? You want to have the title of commissioner? Then you have an obligation to report to and be accountable to the public. Get out of the tower and tell people why their rates are going through the roof and what you’re going to do to fix it. And please don’t tell me it is the best you can do. If that is the case then we need to find people who can do better.

Steve Kalb is a Hamden resident, a former TV news director and radio talk-show host, and is currently a reporter for WELI radio and an adjunct professor of journalism at UConn-Storrs. Every other week, he will cleanse his brain of extraneous thoughts by jotting them down here. You can reach him at sdkalb@gmail.com. (Note: The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the Hamden Daily News.)

Could Corporates Be Greedier?

Having watched Republicans get thrown, no I am sorry, hurled from office on Tuesday I could spend this column handicapping why they lost. But since I have something else in mind, I’ll say it in a sentence and then we can move on. Americans don’t like being lied to over and over and over again and this administration, whether it be on Iraq, the economy or the environment, never saw a lie it didn’t like. There you go.

I had an economics professor who once told me that as economies become more sophisticated they evolve from making stuff to becoming a “service” economy. That means you go from making steel to making software. Less brawn, more brains. Sounds advanced doesn’t it?  Companies always seek the cheapest source of labor and the thinking goes that steel from Korea, Japan or wherever will be paid for by Americans earning more from the sale and service of intellectual property. After all, only a moron would want to have customers in the United States serviced by someone in some second- or Third World enclave whose English barely rivals that of a 10-year-old.

Obviously, we have lots of American companies run by morons.

Consider the following. Last Saturday, while on the Internet, I smelled something coming from the modem on my computer. Maybe it was the puff of smoke followed by the flame that jumped from the modem that convinced me there was something wrong. I put the fire out and called the DSL provider to get a new one. Seemed like a good idea since this one had been on fire! Even the most rudimentary electronic devices don’t work terribly well after they have been on fire. My father taught me that. And if he hadn’t, I probably would have figured it out anyway.

So I called the 1-800 number for the DSL provider and spent the first five minutes pushing “1” for “yes” and “2” for “no” until I was almost ready to launch the phone out the window along with the pitifully melted modem. But I was confident that patience would yield a good result.

I was wrong.

I don’t remember his name. It doesn’t matter. Let’s call him “Fred.” I am not sure what country I had been forwarded to but clearly it was not the United States. He had a thick foreign accent and the lag between question and answer could be measured in seconds.

So I tell “Fred” my modem had caught fire and I needed a new one. He said that was nice and he was there to troubleshoot the problem. Was my modem plugged in? he asked. No, I said, because it had caught fire. He told me to plug it in and tell him how many lights came on. I did. No lights came on because the modem had (take a guess here) caught fire! We spent the next 60 minutes trouble shooting the modem, the wires, the power supply, the network interface and clearly the limits of my patience.

Every once in a while I would remind him that all of this was probably futile because the modem had (let’s try this as a group now) caught fire! Fred politely acknowledged each and every time I had said something and then blithely went on as if I had been speaking in tongues. Clearly he had never been taught the words, “on fire!”  At some point I hung up.

I tell you this not to poke fun at people trying to make a living in a foreign country but to point out how much of American business is run by knuckleheads. How criminally insane do you have to be to think that a customer service representative in a Third World nation (where in many parts there are no sewers or running water) can somehow be trained to provide highly technical customer service support to people tens of thousands of miles away?

Meanwhile, companies line up to battle against any increase in the minimum wage in the United States arguing that it would mean the end to small business.  What moron thinks that anyone can live on $11,000 a year? The next weasel politician that says we shouldn’t raise the minimum wage should be forced to live off the minimum wage for a month. That is less than $1,000 a month. Most of the folks in “the district” blow that much in three days.

In a country that puts price above everything how can we expect anything else?  Company presidents besieged by shareholders who aren’t happy with reasonable returns make unreasonable decisions. We outsource the one thing our “maturing” economy can do well. Pretty soon the only thing we’ll be able to do is constantly refinance our homes to “unlock” the equity so that we can buy more “stuff” made anywhere but here and serviced “over there.” And this country will neither make nor own anything anymore.

Steve Kalb is a Hamden resident, a former TV news director and radio talk-show host, and is currently a reporter for WELI radio and an adjunct professor of journalism at UConn-Storrs. Every other week, he will cleanse his brain of extraneous thoughts by jotting them down here. You can reach him at sdkalb@gmail.com. (Note: The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the Hamden Daily News.)

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