Hold Arizona regulators accountable if they let electric bills skyrocket
If Arizona’s largest electric utility gets away with it, your electric bill will very likely go up. Way up. Especially if you’re a senior. Or a person on a fixed income. Or a person who just likes to save money. Why? For no good reason at all. It’s a ridiculously good deal for Arizona Public Service Co., but a ridiculously bad deal for everyone else. The Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates our state’s utilities, should reject the recommendation they received last month from an administrative-law judge and strike a better balance so customers have more control over how much they pay for electricity.
Your utility bill has two basic parts: the fixed fee you pay, regardless of how much electricity you use, and the volumetric fee you pay, based on how much electricity you use.
What the electricity company wants to do is dramatically hike that fixed fee, in most cases more than doubling it — from $8.67, for many seniors, to as much as $20 a month.
Yikes. That’s the equivalent of a new tax of $11.33 a month, or nearly $140 a year — and it’s a 130 percent increase. It’s the equivalent of one month of groceries for many people in Arizona, especially seniors on fixed incomes. And you have to pay this before you even turn on the lights.
This is unacceptable. Instead, what regulators should require is a better balance between the two sides of the equation used to calculate your electricity bill. Instead of spiking the fixed fee, customers should have the freedom to control their electricity bills. That means they would pay for electricity primarily based on how much they use.
The proposal before the Corporation Commission has many other flaws to it, too, including taking away new customers’ freedom to choose their rate option. Fortunately, it’s not too late to weigh in on this bad proposal, which I hope a lot of people do.
A major reason we have regulators is for times like these. They shouldn’t be rubber stamps. They should be skeptical of radical proposals like this one. They should put a check on regulated monopolies that are arbitrarily trying to increase the amount of money they make without improving services.
Now is time for the Arizona Corporation Commission to step up. It is why we elect them. And if they don’t step up, we should hold them accountable.
Dana Kennedy is the Arizona state director for AARP. Email her at dkennedy @aarp.org; on Twitter, @AZ_AARP.