Streetlight Payments On Way: Utility Paying 81 Towns For Overcharges Going Back Years
By Gregory Seay, The Hartford Courant, Conn.
Jan. 4–The state’s largest electric utility is sending millions of dollars of refund checks this week to 81 communities overbilled for decades for municipal streetlights.
State utility regulators before Christmas completed an audit of Connecticut Light & Power Co.’s refund analysis and set a Friday deadline for the money to be in the hands of municipal customers.
“We’ve updated the calculations for interest accrued through December 31st [2006], and we’re in the process of cutting checks,” CL&P spokesman Mitchell Gross said Wednesday.
The refund distribution, Gross said, will “provide closure to a longstanding issue.”
CL&P has calculated it owes approximately $7.3 million, including interest, to 81 cities and towns to settle claims of streetlight overcharges dating from at least 1986.
The final settlement checks reflect the $1.5 million CL&P had previously reimbursed on overbillings. CL&P serves residential, commercial and municipal customers in 149 Connecticut communities.
The recalculation means that many communities that had already been reimbursed will get an additional refund.
According to CL&P, Hartford is getting the largest refund — just over $2 million. Interest alone to Hartford totaled around $850,000. New Britain will get a check for just under $298,000, Waterbury will get back about $285,000, and West Hartford will see about $826,000.
Portland will receive about $75,000, on top of the $37,000 the town had previously collected from CL&P. First Selectwoman Susan Bransfield said the refund could cover the increased cost of electricity and heating oil that have hit the town in the past year.
“I’m very pleased to hear this is finally ended and the town will receive the money it is owed,” Bransfield said Wednesday. “These are dollars we can definitely put to good use.”
Disbursement of these final refunds ends nearly a decade of intense bickering between CL&P and its municipal streetlight customers who claimed the utility’s lax recordkeeping caused them for years to be overcharged for leased lights and the electricity to power them.
Some communities, such as Stamford and West Hartford, eventually purchased their lights to get control of a key expenditure in their budgets.
CL&P, however, fought a number of efforts by communities and one private consulting firm hired to assist towns to figure out precisely how much they had been overcharged.
Some claims stated that the utility had been overcharging for lights, including some that no longer existed, dating from the 1960s.
In June 2005, the state Department of Public Utility Control ordered CL&P to overhaul its streetlight recordkeeping and go back and compute how much it may have overcharged individual municipal customers for lights, dating from 1986. But CL&P appealed, and in August the state Superior Court upheld the DPUC’s settlement order.
The CL&P refund analysis discovered that 24 municipal customers were undercharged for streetlights, but the utility said they will not be billed for the shortfall as part of the settlement. Forty-four communities won’t get refunds because their streetlight billing was unaffected, Gross said.
Contact Gregory Seay at greg.seay@courant.com.
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Hartford Courant, Conn.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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