As we noted here recently, Pueblo’s travails at the hands of its principal public utility, Black Hills Energy, have been getting a good dose of media coverage. The dust-up between the city’s increasingly restive ratepayers and the Rapid City, S.D.-based corporation was even featured in an extensive report by The Washington Post earlier this summer, noting how Puebloans are being walloped by yet another proposed rate hike to pay for the utility’s abrupt conversion to more expensive fuels, including renewable energy.
The tension came to a head this month at a public hearing held in Pueblo by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. The public showed up, in droves, and it rocked the house. A PUC hearings officer who presided over the standing-room-only event got more than an earful from irate consumers who had had enough. As noted in a news story by the Pueblo Chieftain, which has closely followed the issue, hard-pressed locals from every walk of life in Pueblo told of having to make basic choices no one should have to make just to pay mounting power bills.
The Chieftain published some of the Colorado Consumer Coalition’s perspectives on the development, including these observations:
…(T)he hearings officer took comments from a broad swath of Pueblo citizens who turned out: cash-strapped families, low-income households, seniors on fixed incomes and struggling mom-and-pop businesses just trying to stay afloat.
…(O)ne local small-business owner said he pays $67,000 a month in electric costs for his metal shredding company, which he said is twice what his competitors pay in Greeley and Colorado Springs. Then, he told the gathering something downright profound: “For this community to grow, we need affordable power, and we don’t have affordable power.”
As we also observed in the coalition’s letter to the Chieftain:
One of the top challenges facing Pueblo’s — and all of Colorado’s — economy is the need to rein in the cost of energy.
Yet, forces greater than even the PUC have been pressuring our state lawmakers for years to place politics above consumer interests, driving up the cost of electricity.
One unfortunate outcome of that lobbying effort was the so-called Clean Air Clean Jobs Act of 2010, which induced public utilities to scale back the use of low-cost coal despite the high price of switching fuels. More recently, in the face of stiff new federal air mandates, the cost of electricity is about to get even higher.
As we concluded in our letter in the Chieftain, our coalition of ratepayers representing a broad swath of Coloradans is not for or against any particular form of energy that gets the job done. All we ask is that those entrusted with regulating public utilities in our state—and those who write the policies that those regulators must enforce—make protecting ratepayers their highest priority. No more, no less. And containing cost is central to that priority.
For starters, that means we cannot place politics above ratepayer protection. We cannot afford to put a politicized agenda—renewable energy, or any other—above the interests of struggling ratepayers, like those in Pueblo, who are being forced to give up essentials just to pay their power bills.
It seems that’s all that the citizens who spoke out last week are really saying. And they are running out of patience.