Regulators are on your side, Baltimore Gas and Electric customers.
They saw BGE household electricity prices about to spike 72 percent. They heard your protest, felt your outrage and ordered a plan that not only gives BGE the price jumps it wants but lets it collect interest on the unpaid balance if you can't handle your bill.
It's consumer protection, 21st-century style. Can't afford what The Man has to sell? We'll allow you to go deeper in debt.
This is not what Maryland needs or deserves.
Government hasn't come close to addressing the double-punch of BGE's looming rate shock and plans for BGE's parent to be acquired by a Florida power com- pany.
The "rate stabilization plan" announced by the Maryland Public Service Commission would stabilize rates the way the Corps of Engineers stabilized the 17th Street Canal levee in New Orleans.
BGE electricity prices will soar 72 percent after a five-year cap expires July 1, regulators disclosed yesterday. Unless ratepayers opt out, they go on an installment plan that limits immediate increases to 21 percent and lets BGE collect interest on the balance, which must eventually be paid.
Easy terms available! Bad credit OK!
But, you ask, what's the alternative? Wouldn't it involve reversing deregulation and possibly renegotiating the 1999 settlement that BGE and parent Constellation Energy reached with Maryland regulators?
Wouldn't that raise specters of state expropriation and add to Maryland's stellar reputation at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?
Yep, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
BGE wants to pull nearly $400 million annually from the Central Maryland economy through its rate increases. BGE is an economically critical monopoly. The deregulation that allowed these increases was deeply flawed; it was sold on the notion that electricity prices would fall.
Regulatory intrusion that might be outrageous in another industry can be justified here.
And BGE/Constellation is likely to be open to renegotiation. Thanks to scores of millions of dollars in merger-related bonuses, Constellation bosses probably want to complete the company's marriage to Florida's FPL Group even more than they want to stick Maryland ratepayers with price trauma.
Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and the General Assembly ought to make merger approval conditional on a better deal for Maryland families than a 72 percent price pop and easy financing.
