Last year, Gov. J.B. Pritzker took firm control of the Illinois Commerce Commission. In a bid to rein in rising utility rates throughout the state, he named a new chairman and two others to the five-member body.
Chairman Doug Scott did just what he was sent to the ICC to do.
Late last year, the commission rejected record-setting rate-hike requests from all the utilities serving the Chicago area and, more importantly, put the companies on notice that the days of rubber-stamping their ability to reap profits from massive investments in their fuel-delivery systems were over.
Utilities in this state aren’t used to this level of regulator resistance.
For years, the ICC has given the companies most of what they request in the way of rates. On the few occasions in the past where regulators dared to push back, utilities like Commonwealth Edison took their case to the General Assembly and ran roughshod over the ICC, winning their rate hikes via legislation.
Now, the empire is preparing to strike back. But, since the companies themselves no longer enjoy the clout they once did, thanks mainly to ComEd bribing its way to success in Springfield, the unions representing workers benefiting from large-scale utility infrastructure work are doing the heavy lifting.
In their sights are three relatively new Pritzker appointees to the ICC, including Chairman Scott, who have yet to win Senate confirmation. Unions — outraged by the ICC’s refusal to give the utilities what they want — are threatening to flex their muscle in the state Senate to get those confirmations nixed.
This is no idle threat. The unions enjoy outsize influence with the Democrats who dominate Springfield. Generally, when organized labor wants something badly enough, it gets it.
Senate President Don Harmon, a staunch ally of organized labor, needs to tell his friends to back off. Those commissioners should be confirmed quickly.
We’re in the beginning stages of forging a new energy landscape. On the electricity side, our state’s policy — set in Pritzker’s landmark Climate & Equitable Jobs Act of 2021 — is to eliminate fossil fuels as a source of power generation within a little over two decades. As to heating our homes, carbon-emitting natural gas, too, is likely to give way to electricity, although there’s far more uncertainty about the timing of that transition.
Local utilities — not just ComEd, but Peoples Gas and Nicor Gas, too — are proposing to make capital investments at higher levels than they ever have. If the ICC approves that spending, it will hike rates substantially because utilities are entitled to earn a return on the investments they make.
Scott and co. are right to be scrutinizing these plans and rejecting those they deem profligate. After all, the source of funding for all this work — and all the jobs unions complain are at risk by not caving to the utilities — is all of us. The electricity and gas bills paid by consumers and businesses throughout northern Illinois.
Ever-higher utility rates are no different from tax increases even if they aren’t technically considered taxes. Pritzker has come to realize that. Lawmakers should do the same.
Here’s what we fear: Utilities will seek to hold the ICC confirmations hostage to their energy agenda in the spring session. That likely includes, for example, another run at the monopoly that downstate electric utility Ameren seeks for all future high-voltage lines in its service territory — an anti-competitive policy
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that only will further increase electricity rates in central and southern Illinois and likely open the door in the future to the same policy for ComEd in the Chicago area. Pritzker vetoed that bill last year, and there wasn’t enough support in the fall veto session to override. Unions were furious.Also likely to be an issue is continuing in some form the massive pipe-replacement program in Chicago that Peoples Gas has mismanaged for over a decade and that’s made winter heat unaffordable for roughly a fifth of city households. Under Scott, the ICC late last year rightly ordered an end to Peoples’ “Safety Modernization Program,” calling for a far more surgical and affordable approach to replacing antiquated gas pipes. Unions benefiting from that work — particularly clout-heavy Local 150 of the International Union of Operating Engineers — howled in protest.
Local 150 responded by labeling the Peoples decision “a troubling example of political overreach” by “unconfirmed appointees,” according to the Capitol Fax report. “Unconfirmed appointees.” We can see where this is going.
Harmon and the rest of the Senate Democrats should reject this clumsy attempt at gaining leverage and promptly confirm Scott and fellow Commissioners Conrad Reddick and Stacey Paradis. Both are extraordinarily qualified, having spent their careers in the arcane world of utility regulation and energy policy.
Then, by all means, give the agenda of the unions and utilities a fair hearing.
In the meantime, the regulators, having shown they intend to keep consumers at least as much in mind as utilities, shouldn’t let the union bluster cause them to waver.
It’s a new day for energy policy in this state.
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