‘WHAT ABOUT US?’

INTERVENORS APPEAL TO FTC TO FORCE LIGHT & POWER TO SHARE CRUCIAL INFO

By Emmanuel Joseph

A two-member intervenor team in the Barbados Light & Power Company (BLPC) rate case has called on the Fair Trading Commission (FTC) to order the utility provider to share important documents in the interest of transparency.
The team of attorney Tricia Watson and accountant David Simpson has also cautioned the FTC against reaching any decision in the BLPC’s application for a rate increase without sharing the preliminary compliance filing the utility provider was instructed to lodge by March 7.
“It would not be proper for the FTC to quietly look at that new information by themselves and make a decision on this rate increase; that would be against the law. Neither can the FTC get together privately with the Barbados Light & Power and make a decision. That would also be against the law,” declared Watson, speaking on behalf of the team.
She noted that on March 23, the BLPC, which is seeking a hike in its basic electricity rate, posted a notice on its Facebook page stating that it had submitted the compliance filing within three weeks of the FTC’s decision on February 15, as required. However, that information has not been provided to the intervenors.
In its decision in February, which followed rate hearings late last year, the FTC said it needed more information from BLPC to determine a final electricity rate, and gave the company three weeks to comply with orders regarding the aspects of the application that were denied.
Watson noted that in its decision, the FTC rejected the majority of the information filed by BLPC in support of its requested rate increase.
“Specifically, the company was ordered to amend and refile 14 of the 16 schedules that make up the Memorandum on Rate Base, Memorandum on Income Statement, and Memorandum on Revenue Requirement which contains the all-important Schedule G-1 that sets out the requested rate increase. The only two schedules that were not required to be revised have no measurable impact on the rates,” she said.
Watson recalled that the FTC also rejected BLPC’s 2020 test year revenue figures and ordered that they be recalculated and re-filed to reflect revenues representative of what is expected going forward.
“The rejected schedules that the FTC has ordered to be corrected and refiled contain the company’s evidence that both the FTC and intervenors need to assess whether the company should be granted rate increases. As intervenors, we are tasked with analysing that evidence and making arguments to the FTC on whether the BLPC deserves a rate increase based on all of the new evidence before the FTC,” Watson contended.
She said her team agreed with the commission’s findings that BLPC did not meet acceptable standards of transparency in the rate case, neither in its oral evidence nor in its interrogatory responses. The attorney said they also concurred with the FTC that transparency is paramount in the rate case in order for the process to meet public law standards of natural justice and procedural correctness. “By these same principles, the FTC itself is not being transparent if the FTC excludes the intervenors from receiving the applicant’s compliance filings, thereby preventing them from submitting their arguments in relation to all of that new information. If the FTC does not publish those filings and provide them to intervenors so that we can be heard on the new information, then that would be unlawful,” Watson declared.
“The Barbados Light & Power was ordered to go back and change the bulk of its application. This is not a case of the FTC saying to the Light & Power ‘go back and correct a few typos or correct a few calculation errors’…. No useful purpose would be served in directing Barbados Light & Power to exhaustively revise the application if these were small adjustments being ordered.
“The proper course of action is for the FTC to render its decision and issue the requisite orders rejecting the application as filed,” the attorney contended.
The Watson/Simpson intervenor team assured the public that they would continue to forcefully represent consumers’ interests in the rate case, “irrespective of the FTC’s response to our request to ensure that our regulator acts lawfully and transparently”.
emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb