Fed up with residents’ outage claims being routinely rejected by Southern California Edison, the city of Rancho Palos Verdes is enlisting support from other cities to force the utility to compensate customers who experience prolonged outages.
“We’ve had no satisfaction trying to work through our issues with Southern California Edison,” said Rancho Palos Verdes City Manager Doug Willmore.
Rancho Palos Verdes found a receptive audience among the cities of Palos Verdes Estates, Rolling Hills, Rolling Hills Estates, Lomita and Hermosa Beach. They want the governor and state legislature to force Southern California Edison to automatically compensate customers for prolonged outages, rather than require reimbursement claims be filed.
The local cities have prepared a resolution to present to the League of California Cities during its annual conference this week in San Jose. If the resolution is approved, the league will lobby the legislature when it reconvenes next year to approve an automatic compensation bill.
Assemblymember David Hadley (R – Manhattan Beach), whose district includes the Peninsula and the Beach Cities, said he supports the resolution and believes that the legislature would be receptive.
“We want to make sure that South Bay rate payers get reliable service, fair value for their money, and compensation for issues that Edison should have under control,” Hadley said.
Currently, Southern California Edison only compensates customers for outages due to SCE’s negligence.
This doesn’t include equipment failure, according to the resolution. Rancho Palos Verdes Mayor Jim Knight believes the current policy leads to more outages.
“Given that they’re not required to pay claims for equipment failure, there’s no incentive to improve the maintenance of their infrastructure,” Knight said..
The proposal suggests having the utility, which is owned by investors but regulated by the state, set up a program like that of Pacific Gas and Electric in Northern California. PG&E compensates customers based on the duration of outages and other factors.
When asked to comment, a spokesperson for Southern California Edison said in an email, “SCE’s current Service Guarantee Program, which, like PG&E’s, provides credits of $30 to customers without power for 24 hours or more under certain conditions, as well as credits for other specified events, is similar to the request in the resolution.”
The spokesperson confirmed that the company is “only responsible for losses that occur because of SCE negligence.”
“This standard is on par with the claims approval standards for public utilities, private businesses, city services and other entities,” the SCE email stated. “Claimants who believe their claims were wrongly denied can pursue a legal action against SCE for damages.”
Willmore and Knight, who are attending the conference, believe they’ll get a good response to their proposal.
“I think the resolution has universal appeal to cities under SCE jurisdiction,” Knight said. ER
