Useless Utility Consumer Counselor's Office Agrees To 31% Sewage Rate Increase For Citizens Energy

Citizens Energy is supposed to be a nonprofit, public benefit corporation providing utility services to Indianapolis residents at the lowest rates possible, but the overpaid executives who run the company treat it as a for-profit utility they bilk at our expense to make themselves multi-millionaires. The dishonest executives of the company lied to the public when they claimed its acquisition of Indianapolis' water and sewer utilities would lead to greater efficiencies and smaller rate increases. Instead, we've been treated to annual requests for double-digit rate increases. According to a settlement agreement reached with the Office of Utility Consumer Counselor's Office, Citizens Energy will sock it to ratepayers with yet another staggering 31% hike in sewer bills, hiking average monthly bills from $35 to $46 by 2017.

The useless state utility consumer counselor, David Stippler, says ratepayers should be happy because his office helped save them $26 million a year since Citizens Energy had originally requested a rate increase that would have amounted to $87 million a year. As I've said before, the consumer counselor's office is a big misnomer. Nobody has ever been hired to run that office unless they are approved by the utility lobbyists. If a person in charge of that office ever actually advocated for consumers, they would be run out of this state on a rail by the utility bosses. Utility companies in Indiana have this two-step dance where they always submit rate increases much larger than they really need so they can give the utility consumer counselor's office cover to claim they are advocating on behalf of consumers when a smaller rate increase is approved.

If this agency represented consumers, it would have never agreed to the deal under which Citizens Energy acquired the water and sewer utilities from the City of Indianapolis. The purchase price approved under that deal was about $1 billion higher than what the utility was actually worth. Citizens had to go deeply in debt to provide a half-billion dollar cash payment to the City of Indianapolis, in addition to assuming more than a billion dollars in accumulated debt, attributable in part to the over-valuation of the water utility the City acquired from NiSource, which bought the utility on the cheap, sold off its most valuable assets and neglected to maintain the utility's infrastructure before selling to the City.

Our utility regulators allowed the repeated flipping of the water utility as part of a scheme to enrich self-dealing insiders. That self-dealing included allowing the privatization of the utility to Veolia, the French-owned company which systematically defrauded ratepayers through various over-billing schemes. Ratepayers were forced to absorb a $30 million payoff to Veolia just to make it go away when Citizens Energy acquired the water and sewer utilities from the City. So don't let anyone at the IURC or the OUCC tell you they look out for the interest of the utility consumers. They don't. They're either the most incompetent group of regulators imaginable or they're just bought and paid for by the utility companies and only act for their benefit.

Unfortunately, Indiana lacks any legitimate news media to call out these folks for the corrupt, incompetent bunglers they truly are. So enjoy the millions of dollars in phony TV and radio commercials Citizen Energy's CEO Jeff Harrison, who isn't even qualified to run a corner dime store let alone a major utility, spends for his own personal vanity to tell you what a great job he and his fellow swindlers are doing running a not-at-all public benefit corporation. As long as he and his buddies have their free tickets to Colts and Pacers games, country club memberships and multi-million dollar retirement packages, that's all that matters to them.