Greetings to SBUA members and supporters of small business
Small Business Utility Advocates — SBUA — sends you this update re the Public Utility Commission proceedings re COVID-19 impacts on customers and utilities. Here is the link to the 7/13 Public Meeting including audio/visual link and public comment email address:
Special Public Meeting UM 2114 COVID-19 Investigation Notice and Agenda
The link includes the Staff Report, the Utilities’ input, joint comments from the other parties, and some comments submitted supportive to small business—some of these may look familiar to SBUA supporters since there were a few irregularities in how the small business supportive public comment posting was handled, but it appears this is an effort to correct that.
The PUC process still focuses on residential, which is to be expected as this is a focus of the PUC in this matter (especially for the low income and disproportionately impacted consumers), there is a far larger number both of residential customers and also the residential arrearages are much higher. We are pleased though to read that the Staff has asked that the small commercial customers dealing with wildfires and also with a certain level of air quality degradation not be disconnected. And we appreciate the advocacy of the Joint Comments from Community Advocates with regard to those concerns as well as a recognition of increased disconnects by natural gas over electric small commercial customers. Small Business Utility Advocates seeks to support a fair PUC COVID-19 related process by making it fair for small business including the small business utility customers. These businesses are key utility consumers, the economic engine of the state, and provide jobs for the state’s residents.
Since the last public meeting, SBUA has reached out to at least four counties including Multnomah (largest # of customers) and Malheur (Idaho Power) to inform them on the small commercial utility customers, arrearages re to COVID-19 and possibly leveraging the federal COVID-19 relief dollars in ARPA to reduce these arrearages related to the pandemic. Also on 6/29/21 SBUA held a meeting with small business groups. We have also sought more information from different utilities to learn more about the data we are seeing in the monthly COVID-19 reports.
For the July 13 PUC Special Public Meeting, SBUA will advocate again for the Commission to direct Staff to hold a small commercial customer focused workshop on the small commercial customers in the COVID-19 pandemic PUC proceedings.
- We are concerned for the present where the current (May’21) percentages of the arrearages in the individual utility territories are still much higher in different parts of the state than in the January 2020 period. These businesses had to pay the cost of keeping their businesses functional while not being able to do business, serve customers.
- We are concerned that arrearages and other COVID-19 related costs will be included in future rate cases in the different utilities, even though some of these debts and the stress do to the prospect of disconnection, could been avoided or at least reduced by taking the reasonable measure modeled previously by Washington’s Commission, of including small commercial customers in the later disconnect moratoria that residential customers benefitted from in Oregon.
- Also, we recognize that some local governments are working toward assisting small businesses in paying these arrearages. Related to this assistance, is a concern expressed by small business advocates, that small businesses in those counties would still be subject to rate increase proposals based on small customer COVID-19 related debts elsewhere in Oregon.
Imagine in recovery if the debts and arrearages of COVID-19 pandemic closures and related challenges businesses experienced was alleviated so that there was no need to negotiate recovery of pandemic related costs to small businesses in the future…
There is much to discuss in a workshop, and also such workshop may have benefits for all customers.
Hope to hear back from you on this before 7/13/21 and that you can make it to that meeting. Thanks for considering and for the support!
