SoCal Gas Unions Add Fuel to Furor : Utilities: The company rejects workers’ charge that service is deteriorating.

As state regulators weigh complaints that Southern California Gas Co. has sacrificed service in the interest of cost cutting, a union leader--citing a survey of workers--fueled the debate Monday by saying that growing workloads were harming the utility’s customers.

“Overall, the level of service at the company has definitely deteriorated, and it’s due to understaffing,” said Maureen Lynch, president of Local 132 of the Utility Workers Union of America, one of two unions that began contract negotiations Monday with the gas company.

Of 2,000 members responding to a survey by the Utility Workers and the International Chemical Workers Union--which between them represent 6,000 gas company employees--70% said their workload has grown in the past five years.

The gas company--under a drumbeat of criticism from both the unions and some municipal officials--insists that service has improved, despite objections to the closing of some walk-in payment offices.

A re-evaluation of everything from the utility’s phone system to the way meters are read “has caused us to revisit some of our longstanding service practices and to change them the way customers say they want them to change,” said Al Russell, vice president of SoCal Gas’ operations staff.

Last week, all parties in the dispute filed initial briefs with Greggory Wheatland, an administrative law judge at the state Public Utilities Commission. Wheatland has been conducting hearings on complaints about SoCal Gas service by consumer groups, several ratepayers, the Utility Workers and the cities of Corona, Bellflower and Banning, which lost gas company branch offices last summer.

The PUC is expected to make a final ruling on the dispute by June.

Critics have traded charges with SoCal Gas over service quality since the utility announced plans to close 12 branch offices last May and another 25 offices by the end of 1993. The first dozen offices were shut down as planned. The other 25 remain open, pending the PUC’s ruling on the first closings.

The unions contend that belt-tightening at the utility reflects the financial woes of its parent company, Pacific Enterprises. The PUC has found no link, however, between gas company operations and the problems of Pacific Enterprises, which set out on a costly and unsuccessful diversification program more than five years ago. About 2,000 members responded to the unions’ poll.

Critics of SoCal Gas contend that the gas company--by authorizing more retail stores to accept payments, upgrading its telephone system and making plans to open mini-branch offices--has not filled the gap created by closing its full-service branch offices. The closings, they say, cut service below the levels promised during the utility’s most recent rate hearings.

In their filing before Wheatland, the union and its allies contended that the branch closings particularly hurt “the disadvantaged, disabled, low-income and elderly customers.” It cited a survey of 1,461 customers of branch offices in which 92% said “it was important to pay their gas bills in person so that they would be certain that gas service was not interrupted or turned off.”

The brief filed by the PUC’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates, which acts as an independent consumer advocate within the regulatory agency, singled out SoCal Gas’s new computerized telephone system for criticism. It too urged reopening the closed branches.

“SoCal Gas cannot shut out those customers who need face-to-face contact,” the division argued. “Not all customers write clear, persuasive letters; not all can afford telephone service in their homes or the price of telephone calls from pay phones; not all speak English or maintain checking accounts.”

For its part, the gas company is insistent that service has improved.

Field offices and service personnel are now available until 8:00 p.m. weekdays, and the phone switchboard never closes, Russell said on Monday. Mini-offices staffed by a gas company employee will open in the next few weeks in Bellflower, Corona and Hanford. Service was also expanded recently at half the 150 payment outlets in retail stores.

The utility, in its PUC filing, contended that closing the 12 low-volume branch offices saves almost $2 million a year--”eventually” allowing ratepayers to pocket as much as $855,000 a year in savings while more than $1 million annually goes into new service improvements.

Since last summer’s branch closings, there have been no increases either in gas turn-offs or late payments, according to SoCal Gas’ filing. The critics’ “self-ballyhooed petitions and community reaction are, quite clearly, a sham,” the utility said.