Suppliers

The House Environmental Matters Committee approved a bill yesterday that would let Maryland customers choose their electricity supplier, and guarantee homeowners and renters temporary rate cuts of 3 percent to 7 percent.The measure, adopted by a 14-5 vote, differs in some respects from the electricity deregulation bill pending in the Senate, but not enough to satisfy environmental and consumer groups who have urged Gov. Parris N. Glendening to press for more changes.Besides the residential rate cut, guaranteed for three years, the House bill creates a $24 million fund to help poor people pay their electricity bills, financed 80 percent by fees levied on industrial and commercial customers.

A week after casting doubt on prospects for deregulating the power industry, House Speaker Casper R. Taylor Jr. announced yesterday that he is introducing his own legislation to let Marylanders choose their electric supplier.Taylor said he made several changes, aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, to a business-backed proposal that would open Maryland to competition among electricity suppliers."I feel pretty good about this bill," Taylor said, calling it a "good starting point" for House deliberations.

Regency Homes Corp., the Baltimore-Washington area's eighth-largest homebuilder, said yesterday that it is having financial difficulties.Frank V. Mazza, Regency's chief executive officer, said in a statement yesterday that "Regency is experiencing business difficulties that have impacted home deliveries and relations with customers, subcontractors and suppliers."Industry sources said the company, which has 26 communities from Baltimore to Northern Virginia, might be close to being purchased by another builder.

During the school year, Jamar Holt was a sophomore at University of Maryland Eastern Shore studying physical therapy. But during the summer and on weekends, prosecutors said, Holt was a drug dealer, supplying Northeast Baltimore with cocaine and heroin.Yesterday in Baltimore Circuit Court, Holt, 20, and his brother John, 30, were convicted of distributing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of drugs over two years -- moving roughly a kilogram (or 2.2 pounds) of cocaine every week.The jury acquitted the brothers of murder charges -- the most serious against them in the three-week trial.

Gary Hein grabs a slightly beat-up can off the shelf, the top showing a few rust spots and the cheaply printed, off-register label advising -- to anyone who can read Russian -- that the contents consist of stewed, mashed eggplant."

Helped by a booming market for cellular phones, Tessco Technologies Inc. of Sparks boosted its first-quarter earnings by 63 percent, comfortably exceeding estimates by securities analysts.Tessco, a distributor of accessories and maintenance equipment related to the mobile phone business, said it earned $1.3 million, or 28 cents a share, during the three months that ended June 28. Last year, the company made $819,000, or 18 cents a share, during the period, which is the first three months of Tessco's fiscal year.

MIAMI -- Comforting news for airplane passengers: Federal authorities have shut down a half-dozen aircraft parts purveyors accused of selling potentially defective equipment -- including landing brakes and navigation computers -- to unwitting passenger and cargo airlines.The discomforting angle: After busting unscrupulous parts suppliers Friday, investigators have no way of pinpointing aircraft flying with equipment that could fail. They say that all they do is issue warning bulletins to the airline industry and hope mechanics detect defective parts.

HAGERSTOWN MAY feel like it's sitting in the catbird seat now, as Mayor Steven Sager says, but it could turn out to be a canary sitting on a live wire.The issue is the brave new world of price competition among electrical power suppliers, and the Washington County seat's municipal utility is a much courted buyer.Competing power companies and brokers are offering price cuts of 10 percent to 20 percent below what are already among the lowest rates in Maryland. Potomac Edison, the current contractual supplier to Hagerstown, is eager to buy the city's distribution network, for $20 million and a five-year price freeze.

LABOR AND MANAGEMENT are well aware the recent 17-day strike that shut down General Motors operations nationwide, including here in Baltimore, was just the latest skirmish in a long, long war. The issue that brings out the brass knuckles is outsourcing -- the practice of having outside non-union companies supply component parts at prices much cheaper than high-wage in-company plants can match.The United Auto Workers union considers this practice a threat to its very survival. Its membership today is just over 800,000 -- half of what it was in the 1970s.

'64 order against Giant voidedThe Federal Trade Commission yesterday set aside a 1964 order against Giant Food Inc. that prohibited the grocery chain from influencing its suppliers. The order stemmed from a 1955 FTC complaint against the company that was upheld by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1962. The complaint charged the Landover-based grocery chain with inducing its suppliers to offer, or receiving from its suppliers, compensation for promotional services that Giant knew were not equal to terms those suppliers offered other retailers.

With most Maryland consumers sticking with their electric utility despite having lower-cost options, a key state lawmaker has suggested they could be forced to comparison shop when signing up for service. The proposal could become part of a broader discussion in the General Assembly about the state's electricity markets and ways to get cheaper power and address an impending supply crunch. At a hearing in Annapolis on Tuesday, Del. Dereck E. Davis, chairman of the Economic Matters Committee, floated the idea of offering consumers a menu of options rather than having a default provider and leaving them to seek out other suppliers on their own. The panel has begun a study of the energy industry after rejecting Gov. Martin O'Malley's proposal to re-regulate the markets during this year's legislative session, delivering a major defeat.

The startling crunching and cracking sounds that reverberated through a neighborhood near Oakland Mills High School a couple of hours after daybreak yesterday gave way in the afternoon to duller thumps and thuds that are expected to continue today. Around 8 a.m. yesterday, a backhoe began tearing down a 30-year-old group home co-owned by The Arc of Howard County to make way for a custom-built one. About a half-hour later, the crumpled remains of the house on Torrent Row lay in heaps on the ground.

Jennifer and Rob Brewington of Glenwood switched to an alternative electricity supplier two years ago, saved a few dollars and figured they would renew when the deal expired in June. That was before they checked the details. "It looks like they're raising the rates," says Jennifer Brewington. "Because they were slightly more reasonably priced than BGE back when I signed up with them, I thought they might continue to be." But the new offer, from Washington Gas Energy Services, was about 17 percent higher than what Baltimore Gas and Electric's standard, electric-supply price will be after June 1. The Brewingtons canceled the WGES deal and went back to BGE. Which might be a good idea.

WASHINGTON -- Investigators have moved closer to understanding how a widely used blood thinner killed as many as 19 Americans, identifying the chemical that tainted the Heparin products. Meanwhile, the American companies that made Heparin and its main ingredient blamed suppliers from China for the contamination. The Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that the chemical was a kind of souped-up version of a compound commonly used to treat arthritic joints. The chemical - over-sulfated chondroitin sulfate - is not approved for use in prescription drugs sold in the United States, and it doesn't normally figure in the production of Heparin, FDA officials said.

After more reports of serious side effects, the government urged American drugmakers and their suppliers yesterday to test Heparin products for a mysterious chemical that might have killed several users of the widely used blood thinner. The Food and Drug Administration asked the handful of companies that make Heparin products or their main ingredient to conduct the sophisticated tests for the contaminant. The FDA made the request after authorities in Germany warned that Heparin made there was causing a spike in side effects and issued a recall.

WASHINGTON -- The Federal Aviation Administration lacks an adequate system for checking the quality of commercial airplane parts, creating a potential safety risk for airline passengers, according to a new oversight report. "Neither manufacturers nor FAA inspectors have provided effective oversight of suppliers; this has allowed substandard parts to enter the aviation supply chain," states a 24-page report from the Transportation Department's inspector general. Federal investigators assessed the oversight of suppliers to the nation's major aircraft manufacturers - Boeing Co., Bombardier Aerospace/Learjet Inc., General Electric Aircraft Engines, Rolls-Royce PLC, Pratt & Whitney and Airbus SAS. They found "widespread deficiencies" at all but one of 21 suppliers who make parts for those companies.

Maryland residents face the prospect of power shortages and higher electricity rates unless the state moves to reimpose some regulation on the industry, members of the state Public Service Commission concluded in a preliminary report to lawmakers yesterday. The report is critical of the competitive power market, concluding that unregulated electricity suppliers can't be relied on to deliver low-cost electricity or to build enough power plants to ensure that the lights stay on. But the commission said that full re-regulation of the power industry would be too expensive and impractical.

WASHINGTON -- Federal agents are investigating whether several large food companies charged the government excessively high prices for supplies to U.S. troops in Iraq and Kuwait, administration officials said yesterday. Widening their previously disclosed inquiries into contract fraud and corruption in Kuwait and Iraq, investigators from the Justice and Defense departments are examining deals that the Sara Lee Corp., ConAgra Foods and other U.S. companies made to supply the military, officials said.

Lorraine Washington, 76, of Baltimore's Forest Park section, is precisely the kind of consumer policymakers wished for when they deregulated electricity years ago and told Marylanders, "You Use It. Now Choose It." She learned about electricity alternatives. She shopped for the best deal. She even educated neighbors and got them to switch kilowatt suppliers, away from Baltimore Gas and Electric's standard product. Now she seems ready to give up on the whole mess. After hassling with billing mistakes earlier this year, last week she got a letter saying the deal she had with Ohms Energy and ConEdison Solutions was canceled.

In July, when the first part of the Baltimore Gas and Electric rate increase kicked in, I suggested that electricity prices would drop and counseled households to wait until fall before switching electric-generation suppliers. Fall is here. While consumer kilowatt prices haven't declined as far as wholesale prices, savings can be had. The time to shop is now. For the first time since electricity deregulation kicked in six years ago, it makes economic sense for Baltimore-area households to ditch BGE's standard product and buy kilowatts from a third-party supplier.