Edison Denies Claim of Preferential Treatment : Utilities: An employee of the Los Angeles-area company charged that powerful customers get faster service during outages.

Southern California Edison officials Tuesday denied an employee’s claim that the Rosemead-based utility has lists of powerful customers who get faster service during power outages.

Reginald Henry, a 17-year Edison employee, made the allegations at a Monday press conference in San Diego arranged by Utility Consumers Action Network, a San Diego-based consumer group that is challenging Edison’s efforts to take over San Diego Gas & Electric Co. The list supplied by Henry included the names of Edison executives, a former U.S. attorney general, several Los Angeles Times executives, corporate officers and a handful of California lawmakers.

Edison spokesman Lewis Phelps acknowledged that the utility’s district offices maintain “sensitive customer lists,” but said they “do not exist to provide preferential service treatment to any customers.”

Rather, Phelps said, the lists are compiled to “provide rapid telephone notification to individuals who have a need to know the nature and extent of power outages . . . Edison seeks to restore all circuits affected as quickly as possible.”

Henry has “completely misrepresented and distorted the purpose” of the lists, Phelps said.

Henry alleged that Edison has made a practice of developing lists titled “Officers, Directors and Other Sensitive Customers.” “The purpose of the lists is to provide priority service to the residences of those on the lists in the event of circuit interruptions and extended outages,” Henry said.

The alleged “practice of redlining customer services is a graphic example of the arrogant and insensitive spirit that permeates Edison’s upper management,” Henry said.

However, in a telephone interview, Henry was unable to recall any specific examples of discriminatory or preferential service given anyone on the list. He described generally a 1988 situation when supervisors in Edison’s Monrovia district argued about whether to send a crew to restore service to a VIP or to a so-called low-tolerance customer. Henry said the “important” customer was served before the other customer.

UCAN Executive Director Michael Shames on Tuesday maintained that preferential treatment “is unlawful and elitism at its most insidious.” UCAN has asked the state Public Utilities Commission to prohibit Edison from using the lists to arrange preferential customer treatment.

“I don’t know anything about it,” said PUC President G. Mitchell Wilk. “What we’re going to have to do, obviously, is look at the allegations and see if there is any substance to them, or whether they are just (the charges of) a disgruntled employee. . . . That’s the challenge for us. . . .”

Wilk acknowledged that most utilities maintain contact lists of government officials who are to be contacted if “they have a major problem . . . (but) that’s very different from a preferential service list. . . . I think we have to be real careful about taking the word of one employee before we get all the facts.”

A utility “must provide service to all customers on an absolutely non-discriminatory manner,” said Edmund Texeira, interim director of the PUC’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates.

Henry said he is on stress disability leave from his job and has a claim pending against Edison. He was most recently a customer service manager in the company’s Monrovia district. Phelps described Henry as “a disgruntled Edison employee who has a history of making misleading statements about the company.”

A spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represents about 6,000 Edison employees, also maintained that the lists exist. “We’ve known about these lists for a long time,” said Dean Cofer, business representative for IBEW Local 47. “When there is an outage, those are the areas they check first.”

However, Cofer was unable to supply specific examples of the lists being used to restore service of the supposedly preferred customers first.

Among the nearly 40 names on the list supplied by Henry were former U.S. Atty. Gen. William French Smith, Vons Grocery President William Davila, three Los Angeles Times executives--President and Chief Operating Officer Richard T. Schlosberg III, Chairman Tom Johnson and Donald Wright, a senior vice president--and Edison Vice President Mike Peevey. The list also included executives of several Los Angeles-area corporations, a California assemblyman and a state senator’s aide.

Times Staff Writer Patrick Lee in Los Angeles contributed to this story.