Source: Grist | By Akielly Hu

It’s not uncommon for state regulators to fine utility companies for charging ratepayers for lobbying efforts. In 2022, for instance, the California Public Utilities Commission fined SoCalGas $10 million for using ratepayer money to lobby against local gas bans, federal energy efficiency standards, and building electrification policies. But according to Katy Morsony, a staff attorney at the consumer advocacy group The Utility Reform Network, writing those penalties and detailed annual reporting into law will make it much easier to hold utilities accountable. Morsony also clarified that the bills wouldn’t prevent utilities from engaging in lobbying — they would simply be forced to fund that advocacy work exclusively with money from shareholders. But as households face rising energy costs, she added that any policy to prevent utilities from unlawfully extracting more money from consumers will make a tangible difference. “It’s common sense ratepayer protections,” Morsony said. “When you’re in the energy affordability crisis that we’re in, every dollar counts.”

When households in the United States pay their gas and electric bills, they’re paying for energy, the wires and pipelines it takes to get that energy into their home, and the costs of maintaining that infrastructure. But those monthly payments could also be funding efforts by utilities to lobby against climate policies. While federal law prohibits utilities from recovering lobbying expenses from customers, consumer advocates say that those rules lack teeth and aren’t sufficiently enforced. Now, states are taking the lead to ban the practice. According to the utility watchdog group Energy and Policy Institute, lawmakers in eight states, including California and Maryland, have introduced bills this year that would block utilities from charging customers for the costs of lobbying, advertising, trade association dues, and other political activities. The measures build on a growing trend in state policy: Last year, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine became the first states in the nation to pass comprehensive laws preventing utilities from passing on the costs of lobbying to ratepayers.

Source: Marin Independent Journal | By Richard Halstead

Mark Toney, director of the Utility Reform Network, said, “I look forward to working with the author and the committee to discuss the consequences of this bill, particularly for renters and low-income homeowners who aren’t able to have solar.”

Connolly's legislation, Assembly Bill 2619, would repeal the CPUC's decision and require it to create a new rule structure based on the clean energy goals set by Senate Bill 100, which committed the state to achieving 100% clean carbon-free energy by 2045. Severin Borenstein, a business professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said the proposed legislation would subsidize residential solar operators by raising electricity prices on everyone else. "Making other ratepayers pay for it is a hugely regressive tax," Borenstein said. "Those other ratepayers are poorer than the people who are putting in solar.”

Source: Cal Matters | By Alejandra Reyes-Velarde

“Honestly, how much longer do folks have to wait?” asked Ashley Salas, an attorney with the consumer group, The Utility Reform Network (TURN). “How much longer are folks going to be harmed?” Advocates say they were not aware of any changes the utilities commission made to their application process, and regardless of the changes, residents without legal status haven’t been able to access the program. “It’s not making a meaningful difference for folks to be able to access the program,” Salas said.

It’s been 10 years since California decided to let low-income undocumented immigrants qualify for state subsidies of phone and internet services. Today the California LifeLine program — which helps 1.2 million low income households get free or discounted services — still excludes hundreds of thousands of undocumented residents because they don’t have Social Security numbers.

Source: CalMatters | By Justo Robles

Mark Toney, executive director of the consumer group the Utility Reform Network (TURN), noted that if this relief is approved, the utilities would immediately start collecting it. “PG&E shouldn’t automatically be getting this money without a field inspection to make sure they did the right work in the right locations with the right result, and they certainly should not be getting advance payment,” he said. The commission is scheduled to vote on that on March 7.

But PG&E also is seeking another overall rate increase for this year. In June PG&E requested rate hikes to reimburse the utility $688 million for wildfire safety work it had completed. State regulators earlier this month issued a counter proposal that would allow the utility giant to collect $516 million from customers. A typical residential customer’s bill would go up $4 to $6 a month during the first year, although the lowest-income customers would pay $3 or $4, according to the commission’s proposal.

Source: CBS News Sacramento | By Tori Apodaca

"This fixed charge would just shift some fixed cost out of electricity rates onto a new line item on customer's bills, a fixed charge," said Sylvie Ashford, energy and climate policy analyst at The Utility Reform Network (TURN), which advocates for ratepayers. TURN supports the fixed rate on customers' bills. Ashford said it would cut down energy use for all customers. “Because the fixed charge is removing costs from usage ($/kWh) rates, usage rates go down for all customers, “ Ashford said. “Thus, the bill impacts from the TURN/NRDC proposal are roughly $8-10 in monthly bill savings for low-income customers, and roughly $3-7 monthly bill increases for other customers, depending on energy usage.”

Low-income customers who are enrolled in the CARE program receive a 30-35% discount on their electric bill and a 20% discount on their natural gas bill and FERA customers receive an 18% discount on their electricity bill. The new tiered system for a fixed rate on your utility bill would be based on how much you make, following the existing CARE and FERA programs. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) currently has several proposals in front of it that it believes would lower costs for lower-income families. It was passed back in 2022, but now some democratic legislators are pushing back with Assembly Bill 1999.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle | By Annie Vainshtein

“What AT&T is seeking is really, really profound,” said Regina Costa, telecommunications policy director for The Utility Reform Network. “By removing that obligation, that means there is no one that can guarantee service for a customer.”

An effort by AT&T to pull out of its obligations to offer landline services across a huge swath of California — including most of the Bay Area — has raised impassioned safety concerns among residents worried about what might happen if they lose access to their traditional wired phone lines, especially in the event of a natural disaster or other emergency. As the designated “carrier of last resort” in California, the telecommunications giant has long been required to provide basic phone services to people who want them, as required by state law. Such services are cheap, ubiquitous and heavily regulated.

Source: Los Angeles Times | By Sammy Roth

“We’re not interested in seeing anybody’s bill goes up. But it’s a zero-sum game,” said Matthew Freedman, an attorney at the Utility Reform Network, a consumer watchdog group. “Somebody is going to pay more, and somebody is going to pay less. That’s just how it works.”

Confronting the climate crisis won’t be cheap. California is trying to figure out who will pay. Under a series of proposals being considered by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s appointees to the Public Utilities Commission, the wealthy would be forced to cough up, in the form of flat fees on their monthly electric bills. But so would middle-class families. The debate has raised difficult questions of socioeconomic justice and climate progress — and prompted a group of Democratic lawmakers to try to repeal a monthly fee requirement they approved less than two years ago.

Source: Canary Media | By Jeff St. John

That’s why the Public Advocates Office, along with key environmental justice and ratepayer advocacy groups, have proposed much lower fixed charges instead. Those include a joint proposal filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and ratepayer advocacy nonprofit The Utility Reform Network, as well as a compromise proposal from the California Environmental Justice Alliance. While they differ in details, all include much lower monthly fixed charges than what utilities are proposing, as the chart below shows.

Last month, California Assemblymembers Jacqui Irwin (D-Thousand Oaks) and Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park) introduced a bill that would overturn a provision of a state law passed in 2022 that orders the California Public Utilities Commission to study and institute an ​“income-graduated fixed charge” for customers of the state’s three big utilities. The newly introduced bill, AB 1999, would limit the CPUC to adding a fixed charge of no greater than $10 a month on customers’ bills to pay for the rising costs of maintaining the state’s utility grids, regardless of household income. That’s an amount far lower than what’s been proposed under several income-based rate plans.

Source: The Mercury News | By Ethan Baron

“The consequences are life threatening,” said Regina Costa, telecommunications policy director for consumer group The Utility Reform Network. Hundreds of thousands of households in the Bay Area and millions around California would lose landline service if the commission approves AT&T’s proposal, Costa estimated. AT&T declined to say how many households in the Bay Area or California would be affected.

Thanks to its earlier monopoly status and state law requiring voice communications for all who want them, AT&T is for large areas of California the “carrier of last resort” — the utility required to provide phone service to anyone wanting it in its service area. In its proposal to the utilities commission to escape that obligation, the company said it is seeking to stop landline service only in areas “where there is a demonstrated voice alternative.” Nearly all those commenting said they opposed the plan, citing a host of concerns, from medical crises to loss of communications during earthquakes, fires, floods and storms because cell phone infrastructure is damaged or power outages cut off internet service.

Source: Santa Cruz Sentinel | By George Avalos

PG&E customers could be paying $4 to $6 more a month for their utility service if the powerful five-member PUC panel agrees with the proposal issued by the PUC law judge, estimated Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, or TURN. Toney believes the PUC will agree to the proposal. He noted that the state PUC has approved four prior requests by PG&E for interim rate relief. “The chances are good that this will sail right through,” Toney said.

PG&E customers face the forbidding prospect of higher monthly bills — starting this spring — now that a state law judge has smoothed out a pathway to interim rate relief for the utility behemoth. An administrative law judge for the state Public Utilities Commission has issued a proposed decision that clears the way for the PUC commissioners to make a final decision in March that would authorize PG&E to extract more money from customers. Law Judge Camille Watts-Zagha issued the proposal.

Source: KMUD News | By Lisa Music

Regina Costa, the Telecommunications Policy Director for TURN, stated, “Universal telephone service is really essential for society. Being the Carrier of Last Resort means that everybody that AT&T serve[s], is entitled to have a service that will work, that you can use to communicate with your family, your friends, your job, your kids’ school, and people in Humboldt County know this very well.” The petition submitted by AT&T would relieve them of a century-old obligation to the residents within their designated territories, leaving those within their service areas without guaranteed reliable communication access, leaving AT&T free to put profit over service, Costa said. “[T]hey could stop [service] within six months, and they could do things like picking and choosing …a part of town they think is more lucrative [to] put new facilities in and start offering their more advanced services in those areas. [T]hey could focus on the more affluent neighborhoods. They can even deny people service by running credit checks.”

Throughout California, telecom companies are obligated to provide Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) to all areas, ensuring connectivity even in remote or underserved regions. The petition by AT&T seeks to remove their obligation to their designated COLR areas, allowing the telecom company to discontinue copper-line phone service in their service areas if other voice service options are available. However, advocacy groups like The Utility Reform Network (TURN), Rural County Representatives of California (RCRC), The Center for Accessible Technology (CforAT), and the Advocates Office at the California Public Utilities Commission (Cal Advocates), to name a few, are opposing the applications.

Source: GV Wire | By Nancy Price

The Utility Reform Network, which advocates for ratepayers, says the proposal would hike customers’ bills on average by $4 to $6 per month. And that’s on top of the $35 average monthly increase that went into effect on Jan. 1, plus other rate hike proposals pending before the PUC. PG&E had been authorized to spend $4.7 billion on wildfire mitigation and other costs but overspent by $10 billion, Toney said. A 2019 state law apparently gave carte blanche to the utility to spend freely without prior authorization. PG&E is guaranteed a specified profit, so $14 billion would generate more profit for investors than $4 billion. AB 2154 created the California Wildfire Fund to provide insurance protections to utilities in the event of catastrophic wildfires and to prevent them from going bankrupt. It was designed to give PG&E some flexibility in spending and the ability to recover its costs later, but “I don’t think anybody imagined that they would have overspent by this magnitude, ” Toney said.

Customers of Pacific Gas & Electric could be facing yet another bill increase — possibly as early as this spring. On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission issued a proposed decision that would allow PG&E to start collecting $516 million in revenues for what the utility spent on wildfire safety and infrastructure upgrades several years ago.

Source: Canary Media | By Jeff St. John

Toney of The Utility Reform Network agrees with the Sierra Club and NRDC that California needs to find ways to help its residents meet the state’s aggressive electrification goals. ​“We’re absolutely joined at the hip when it comes to leadership on climate policy,” he said. ​“Where we differ is on the revenue streams to pay for that.” So far, ratepayers have largely borne the costs of the gigawatts of solar power the state’s major utilities have signed contracts for over the past decade and a half, as well as for the roughly $1.5 billion in utility electric-vehicle charging programs launched in the past half-decade. Toney says he’d like to see state lawmakers direct more taxpayer dollars to fund these programs instead. Nor does Toney think that SCE should be allowed to add new building-electrification costs to its customers’ bills until it can explain how that doesn’t just duplicate other sources of funding.

When SoCal Edison first announced its plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help 250,000 customers install heat pumps back in 2021, some building-electrification advocates saw it as the kind of proactive step utilities need to be taking to transition their customers off of fossil fuels and help California meet its ambitious climate targets. Others saw it as an unproven building-electrification strategy that could add new charges to already-expensive electric bills, without clear evidence of long-term cost reductions and climate benefits.

Source: Bakersfield | By John Cox

The CPUC Office of Ratepayer Advocates did not respond to requests for comment. But Regina Costa, the telecommunications policy director at The Utility Reform Network, a San Francisco-based organization that advocates on consumers' behalf, expressed skepticism with AT&T's proposal. Costa noted the VoIP service that some customers would be expected to switch to comes with vulnerabilities that landlines don't, such as susceptibility to potential cyberattacks. Rural areas could be "profoundly impacted" by AT&T's proposal, she added.

Consumers' reliance on landline phone service in places such as rural and urban parts of Kern County is being weighed against AT&T Inc.'s drive to refocus on more modern technology in a case pending before the California Public Utilities Commission. The Dallas-based telecommunications giant is asking the CPUC for permission to stop offering landline service in census-designated places where at least half local residents have cellphone coverage or other alternatives.

Source: Manteca Bulletin | By Dennis Wyatt

"Every increase that you hear about is just the tip of the iceberg,' The Utility Reform Network executive director Mark Toney said. "And every increase that gets approved by the California Public Utilities Commission stacks on top of each other. TURN noted PG&E is asking the CPUC to allow them to start collecting the additional $2 billion on an interim basis in March before the rate request completes the required regulatory review process.

PG&E’s record $13.5 million rate hike granted in mid-November was bad enough, as far as San Joaquin County Supervisor Robert Richman is concerned. But the utility’s request less than a month later for another $2 billion rate hike crossed over into being “outrageous” and is not reasonable or acceptable, according to Rickman. It is why Rickman who represents Ripon, rural south Manteca, Tracy. and Mountain House is asking his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors when they meet Tuesday to register official opposition to the proposed rate hike with the California Public Utilities Commission.

Source: ABC7 News | By Lyanne Melendez

"San Francisco is not as volatile as some of these areas that have burned recently," said Mark Toney from The Utility Reform Network, commonly known as TURN.

Undergrounding overhead utilities has a long history in California that dates back to 1967. In fact, the city of San Francisco has put roughly half of its utility lines underground. But today, PG&E says there is no money left to underground the rest of San Francisco, much to the disappointment of homeowners.

Source: Point Reyes Light | By Ben Stocking

“For over 100 years, the state, the C.P.U.C. and the federal government have promoted the idea that communities need reliable communication,” said Regina Costa of The Utility Reform Network, an Oakland-based consumer group. “AT&T is saying, ‘We don’t want to do that anymore, so goodbye, good luck and good riddance.’” Yet Ms. Costa said the upgraded broadband networks have yet to be installed in many rural regions—and they can’t be relied upon during power outages. “With your basic copper phone, it will work in a power outage, and you can guarantee it,” she said. The Utility Reform Network is one of several consumer groups that have urged the C.P.U.C. to reject AT&T’s application. Harriet Barlow, a Point Reyes Station resident who relies on a landline, hopes their challenge succeeds.

AT&T wants to stop providing traditional landline service in California, a move that could leave many customers in rural areas like West Marin with limited communications options—or perhaps none at all—during emergencies. AT&T’s request has outraged consumer advocates, who say that telephone companies should not be allowed to back out of their obligation to provide universal telecommunications service.

Source: KRCR | By Tyler Van Dyke

On Tuesday, we spoke with the Utility Reform Network (TURN) who is against the proposal to get their side of things and figure out more details on the proposal and the next steps. Telecommunications Policy Director Regina Costa explained to us the complicated process it will be.Costa explained that TURN believes that even if AT&T is denied they will then try to make it a law. "We think that their application they haven't been able to support it and we really think that their goal is to take this to the legislature to try and convince them to just put a bill through regardless of what the commission does, so you know this is kind of the preliminary round." Costa also said one of AT&T’s main arguments is that a lot of people don't use landlines these days, “One of their arguments is not as many people are using landlines but the other side of the coin is you’ve got over a million Californians using landlines,” Costa continued, “you have a situation where they have actively tried to drive people away from using landlines by not maintaining their network and then when people call in to complain it will take you a long time to fix it but if you want to switch over to this service you’ll get it right away, this is the game that they have been playing for a few years now, they’re obligated to maintain those lines and they haven’t done it.”

AT&T sent customers a letter informing them that they may no longer provide landline services in certain service areas throughout California. The letter states AT&T submitted an application to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) that, if approved, would remove AT&T’s obligation under California law to provide traditional landline phone service in a large portion of our service territory in California. This leaves customers in rural areas, with spotty service as it is, concerned.

Source: SF Standard | By The Standard Staff

Mark Toney, a consumer advocate with The Utility Reform Network, predicts PG&E will try to increase rates by a total of $100 per customer per month this year based on shareholder documents outlining plans to recoup billions of dollars spent on wildfire-proofing its systems. Because CleanPowerSF customers rely on PG&E equipment, “every PG&E increase hits their pocketbook,” Toney said.

Pacific Gas & Electric officially became California’s most expensive power provider this January. The designation, calculated by the California Public Advocates Office, comes after the company won approval from state regulators to raise rates about $30 per month, or about $400 per year, for the average customer to cover the cost of burying power lines and other wildfire safety efforts.

Source: KRON 4 | By Rob Nesbitt

Executive Director of The Utility Reform Network (TURN) Mark Toney says many PG&E customers are having to choose between heating their homes or feeding their families. “More and more people are falling behind and are in danger of being disconnected,” Toney said. “Many of whom are going to end up on the street homeless because they are going to be evicted from their properties.” TURN is pushing for new legislation that will cap future rate increases. “At no more than the cost-of-living adjustment provided by social security on an annual basis,” Toney said.

Rate increases for PG&E customers have piled up in the last year and another could be coming in March. Even some customers doing the math say their bills just don’t add up. The start of the New Year hasn’t been easy on the wallets of PG&E customers. Despite warnings about rate increases, social media is full of posts like this.