You don’t have to read anything. You don’t even have to listen to anything to know that Commonwealth Edison clobbered the city in negotiating its proposed new 29-year franchise agreement. Just push the mute button, roll the tape of the October 22 press conference at which the tentative agreement was announced, and watch the mayor of the nation’s third-largest city stare down at the podium and hang his head like a whipped dog.
- How bad is it?
But the proposed franchise says nothing about bills. It couldn’t say anything directly, since state law requires that the Illinois Commerce Commission set utility rates for privately owned utilities. (By the way, this is one reason groups such as IVI-IPO and the Labor Coalition on Public Utilities favor having the city buy out Edison instead of negotiating a new franchise: publicly owned utilities may not be subject to what these groups consider the anticonsumer bias of the ICC.) But the franchise could have dealt with bills indirectly; after all, the city took credit for Edison’s agreeing to slightly lower service fees in an ICC proceeding in August 1990. Similarly, the franchise could have included an agreement under which the city and Edison could jointly petition the ICC for lower rates for low users of electricity (Edison now gives volume discounts, so a Lake Forest family heating its swimming pool pays less per kilowatt hour than a west-side family huddling around a lone space heater).
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Conservation. One way to lower electric bills is to lower rates; the other way is to use less power or use the same amount more efficiently. Other electric utilities across the country have found it cheaper to spend money to help consumers conserve than to build new power plants. Com Ed has fought this trend tooth and nail; in his June testimony, the city’s Robert Helman displayed a striking bar graph showing that Edison budgets 25 cents per customer for energy-efficiency programs, whereas Southern California Edison spends $17.49 and Wisconsin Power $68.06.
Even the $25 million is cold comfort to CUB’s Susan Stewart. “All those programs were previously mandated by the Illinois Commerce Commission,” she says, adding that the recently announced plan to distribute light-bulb kits at cost may well have come out of the behind-closed-doors negotiating process now being conducted by the ICC in lieu of public proceedings on least-cost energy planning.
Advantage: Edison.
So what kind of accountability did the city get? According to Reddick, the proposed franchise requires not just an annual report from Edison (as the 1948 agreement did)–it also requires that report to include updates on conservation, reliability, affirmative action, construction plans, outages, forecasts, and copies of some of Edison’s reports to other regulatory bodies. And it mandates an annual meeting between the city and Edison to discuss them. Serious disagreements could go to a panel of three “disinterested” engineers, exactly as under the 1948 agreement. And if that didn’t help, in theory the city could exercise its option to acquire the utility.
