Citizens’ Utility Ratepayer Board restores some power to consumer counsel

The Citizens’ Utility Ratepayer Board on Wednesday restored some of the authority to its consumer counsel that it had taken away last month.

The board voted 3-0 in a teleconference meeting to allow acting consumer counsel Niki Christopher to intervene in cases where the Kansas Corporation Commission reviews bill surcharges for such expenses as transmission, environmental compliance and energy-efficiency programs.

Privately owned utilities such as Westar Energy, Kansas Gas Service and Kansas City Power & Light are allowed by law to recover those costs from consumers, but have to file evidence of their spending with the KCC to collect the money.

Both the KCC and CURB staffs have traditionally reviewed those filings to ensure that the utilities are only claiming costs to which they are legally entitled.

Christopher asked the CURB board for blanket approval to intervene in those cases because they’re usually handled in a very short time frame and CURB only has access to utility data justifying the charges if it formally joins as a party to the case.

Christopher will still have to get board approval to intervene on CURB’s behalf in all other kinds of cases.

The board made no changes to policies approved last month prohibiting Christopher from speaking to the news media or representing utility consumers at the Legislature, traditional roles of the consumer counsel.

The board is in the process of trying to hire a permanent consumer counsel to replace David Springe, who left CURB in December for a position as executive director of National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates. The association represents state utility consumer advocates in Washington.

Also Wednesday, the CURB board decided to stay out of one utility case and to intervene in another.

CURB is taking a pass on a case in which Black Hills Energy is seeking permission to make loans to customers who have to pay for extension of utilities to their remote rural homes. Christopher had recommended entering the case to ensure that the customers wouldn’t wind up paying excessive finance charges.

The board approved intervention in a KCP&L case that seeks to restore some of the discount once enjoyed by customers with electric home heating. The discount was withdrawn in 2010, and efforts by CURB and KCC Commissioner Pat Apple to restore it failed last year.

On Monday, the KCC self-reported that Apple had met with KCP&L executives in November, after the commission ruled on KCP&L’s rates but before the company challenged its rulings in court.

Christopher urged the CURB board members on Wednesday to disclose if they had had any private contacts about the case with Apple while it was being considered by the KCC, which could be seen as an unethical “ex-parte” communication.

Commissioners are bound by judicial ethics rules in rate cases because they exercise quasi-judicial authority.

The three members who participated in the meeting said they had not had any contact with Apple about the case. One member, James “Lenny” Mullin II, was absent from the meeting.

The board at present has only four of the five members called for in its enabling law.

Former CURB board chairman Brian Weber, a former Republican state legislator, resigned from the board in December, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family and business.

His resignation closely followed a pivotal meeting in Wichita where his colleagues had proposed shifting the CURB mission away from litigating Kansas utility rate cases and toward fighting federal air-quality regulations, a change in direction Weber said he could not support.

This story was originally published January 6, 2016 at 8:33 PM with the headline "Citizens’ Utility Ratepayer Board restores some power to consumer counsel."