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CUC board consults legal counsel ahead of CPUC hearing
The board of the directors of the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. has reaffirmed one of its rate case applications for the scheduled Commonwealth Public Utilities Commission public hearing, which will begin on Thursday.
The board held a special meeting, discussing their rate case application in a two-hour executive session with their consultants, economists.com.
CUC legal counsel James Sirok said the rate case was put under executive session “to confer with the attorney considering rate matters.”
“This is a strategy meeting for adjudication that begins during the hearing, just like a court case,” Sirok said.
CPUC will conduct the public hearing on Thursday and Friday beginning at 10am at CUC’s main conference room.
According to acting board chair Eric San Nicolas, there were no changes to the application, Docket 15-03, which was already approved since February and was filed before CPUC in March.
“We called this special board meeting with to consult with our legal counsel with regards to our docket that’s going to be heard on Thursday meeting,” San Nicolas said.
Docket 15-03, is CUC’s application to eliminate the Water Electric Charge and Wastewater Electric Charge and to increase the electric rates, fees and/or charges, was initially submitted last year but was amended to modify the surcharge rate.
“This Amendment to Petition is being filed for the purpose of simply modifying the originally proposed surcharge rate under the filing from approximately $0.0194 per kWh to $0.01369 per kWh,” the docket states.
However, Docket 16-01, which contains CUC’s Petition for the Establishment of a Disaster Recovery Surcharge and a Capital Improvements Surcharge, is not part of CPUC’s agenda despite it being also submitted in March.
The petition “seeks the establishment of a Disaster Recovery Surcharge of $0.0145/kWh to be implemented for a one-year period and for the establishment of a Capital Improvements Surcharge of $0.0225 /kWh to be implemented for a two-year period.”
“This session was put together in an expedited manner so that there is not enough time to do the full course of discovery that is part of the general process of considering a Docket for 16-01,” Sirok said.
