PUC Head to Help UCAN Regain SDG&E; Billing Access

State Public Utility Commission President Donald Vial pledged Wednesday to help the financially strapped Utility Consumers Action Network regain access to San Diego Gas & Electric monthly billing notices.

“It’s critical that the (utility rate-making) process include the views of residential ratepayers,” Vial told about 50 UCAN members at the group’s annual meeting Wednesday night. “That way, the rate-making record will truly reflect reality.”

During the past two years, UCAN, a nonprofit consumer group formed in 1983, used the billings to attract more than 75,000 members among SDG&E;’s residential and business customers. UCAN also generated enough income to become a major force in SDG&E;’s recent rate-making cases before the PUC. UCAN claims that its presence at PUC meetings has saved SDG&E; customers more than $90 million in “imprudent” SDG&E; energy purchases alone during the past two years.

However, last April UCAN lost its access to the envelopes and won’t be able to resume mailings until after the U.S. Supreme Court determines in a similar case involving a Northern California utility whether if is constitutional for the PUC to force utilities to include the mailings from outside groups such as UCAN.

Since being denied access, UCAN, which has spent more than $121,000 on rate-making litigation during the past year, has been forced to drop out of two major PUC hearings that could affect SDG&E;’s gas and electric rates. UCAN also cut its two full-time staff members back to part-time work.

Vial, who two years ago voted to give UCAN access to SDG&E;’s billing envelopes, said that access to billings gives consumers “encouragement to build their own organizations and bring to us the (input) that we need in the rate-making process.”

The state PUC has been responding to “national policies” which place a greater emphasis on “free market forces,” Vial said. “The commission has got to determine how that change should come about without selling the ratepayers short.”

Vial cautioned that consumers and utilities must look to the long term, even though “these market forces seem to be working well with the costs of gas and oil coming down, and rates coming down with them.”

Vial refused to predict the outcome of a PUC vote on a proposed holding company which SDG&E; officials hope to use to house its planned non-utility industry business ventures.