Certain aspects of the side-by-side presentation made in the Jan. 17 Forum relating to KIUC require further consideration together with some new topics. KIUC management was invited by The Garden Island to make a response to my Forum article. I
Certain aspects of the side-by-side presentation made in the Jan. 17 Forum relating to KIUC require further consideration together with some new topics.
KIUC management was invited by The Garden Island to make a response to my Forum article. I was not given a chance to review what was said by David Bissell, its president.
In the initial paragraph of the Bissell article, he asserts that I am attacking “our cooperative” and he goes on to refer to my “animosity” toward the cooperative. These mistaken comments reflect a besieged mentality. In recent years, I have written several articles expressing my concern to actions or omissions by KIUC management, but in no case have I attacked the cooperative itself. It seems that whenever anyone expresses criticism off the course KIUC has taken or is taking, KIUC management construes it as an “attack” — a frequently used word. The body of KIUC is its member-owners. The management is installed to administer its affairs. KIUC is the responsibility, not the property, of its management.
The primary intent of my Jan. 17 article was to observe that in the recently completed election, requiring added charges for KIUC members wishing to retain conventional meters, the membership was being offered a flawed choice.
When KIUC acquired the smart meters to obtain customer usage information, it was doubtlessly motivated by the fact that usage of the smart meters for that purpose should be less costly than the reading of conventional meters. If cost savings were not achieved, no valid reason for the change was stated. But KIUC management has carefully suppressed the information to the savings it will achieve through smart meter use, instead focusing on its claim that it costs KIUC $10 plus per month per customer to read conventional meters.
My article expressed the view that instead of asking its members whether they approved of the $10 plus charge for members retaining their old meters, what KIUC should have done is offer to give members willing to convert to smart meters the cost reduction KIUC would achieve from their use. If this choice had been given, rather than adding about $350,000 in annual costs for KIUC customers, KIUC members with smart meters would have an undisclosed but probably significant reduction in their charges. A carrot is always better than a stick.
Remember the invitation that KIUC management was given to offer a response to my article that advised KIUC members were given an imperfect choice and offered a suggested improvement? Although Bissell claimed his article was a rebuttal, it failed to say one word about the principal point of my article. If KIUC management had objections to the suggestion made, it never chose to offer them. Instead, Bissell used the invitation given to him as a platform to extol KIUC management’s devotion to serving its membership, to quibble about its KE acquisition costs, to ramble about KIUC diversifications from fossil fuel generation and to make some personal comments.
The results from the election are now in. Members predictably voted by their pocketbooks. Those with smart meters voted to avoid rate increases for them and those with conventional meters voted to avoid the additional charges. The KIUC board chairman declared victory, saying he was grateful for members’ decisions to support the board’s imposition of the rate charge for those without smart meters. Another chapter in KIUC’s dubious history has been written.
KIUC management has indeed had some accomplishments. The members’ equity in the KIUC capitalization has grown from zero at the time of the acquisition of KE in 2002 to about 26 percent today, improvements in generating facilities have occurred, its outage record is good and modest diversification from fossil fuel has been achieved.
The people of our island would like to believe that they are being treated well by KIUC, but after more than 10 years of its operations, there has been no rate reduction — indeed, a small increase has occurred — and when the opportunity was presented to give members a reduction, KIUC management chose to do the opposite.
KIUC management urgently wants you to believe that it is serving the interests of its members. And Bissell states a goal of at least a 10 percent rate reduction for its members. But he carefully avoids any indication of when that goal might be achieved or how it would happen.
KIUC members would clearly be served well by a reduction of electric usage charges, which are among the highest in the nation. If KIUC management is to be credible, it must achieve this in a timely manner.
Walter Lewis writes a regular column for The Garden Island.
