Metamorphosis

"Power to the People" is now "Rates and Rights"

Investor-owned utilities — lovingly known as “IOUs” here at the Office of the Consumer Advocate (OCA) — do not limit their advocacy on behalf of their profit-maximizing shareholders to the hearing room of the Public Utilities Commission (PUC). They also push out, relentlessly, a lot of public messaging — lovingly known as “propaganda” here at the OCA — in an effort to convince the world that these monopoly providers of essential public services are virtuous in their pursuit of customer benefits at the same time they face ominous headwinds that justify generous compensation for their owners.

My job, as the head of the office tasked by statute to represent the interests of residential utility customers, is to tell a different story — at the PUC, before other tribunals, and in the court of public opinion.

So it has been that, since 2017, I’ve been writing a column about my work. For eight years, the home of the column was InDepthNH.org, one of the state’s two major nonprofit web-based news organizations. Today the column completes its migration to the Concord Monitor, a venerable Pulitzer Prize-winning news organization that has been continuously publishing its daily newspaper since the Civil War.

At InDepthNH.org, the column was known as “Power to the People.” Now it becomes “Rates and Rights.” I like the new title better; it is less glibly redolent of the 1960s. Nothing against the Black Panthers, or John Lennon and Yoko Ono; I just don’t see how their legacies have much logical connection to the quest for safe and reliable service for utility customers at the lowest possible cost with a maximum amount of individual freedom built in (to paraphrase the revised statutory charge for the OCA that is working its way through the New Hampshire General Court).

I owe a debt of gratitude to InDepthNH.org for allowing me to test the concept of a column by the state’s officially designated ratepayer advocate. Though I am independent, and pride myself on being a thinker who is not captive to any political party or ideology, I am nevertheless a state official and, in that sense, I belong on the other side of the journalist’s notebook. I am proud to say that over the eight years of “Power to the People” I was able to prove it was possible to educate readers about issues relates to energy and utilities while letting other journalists handle questions and controversies in those rare circumstances where I became the newsmaker. Over those eight years there were no journalism ethics scandals involving me — indeed, there weren’t even any questions or controversies. None.

Let me stress here that ending my arrangement with InDepthNH.org was not my choice. The editor there abruptly decided to cancel the column in November, for reasons I do not understand. Maybe someone who cares about inside baseball should call and ask her about it.

Meanwhile I’m also grateful to Monitor publisher Steve Leone for his enthusiasm in adopting me. Affiliating with the Monitor brings me, pleasingly, full circle. Professionally speaking, I first planted my flag in these parts in 1984 by taking a job with the tri-state Northern New England Bureau of Associated Press, whose headquarters was the attic of the Monitor’s old offices in downtown Concord. My home base was the Bureau’s outpost in Portland — and I ended up staying in Maine for 14 years, jumping to the legendary newsweekly Maine Times and eventually heading to law school and then clerkships with state and federal judges. Unlike some ,I never burned out on journalism — continuing to practice that craft, as a columnist, is enormously rewarding and I could not be more enthusiastic about my columns appearing in the Monitor and, perhaps, other outlets that republish content from the Monitor.

“Rates and Rights” is pleasantly alliterative, but rest assured I have not forgotten — and neither editors nor readers should forget — that utility customers do not pay rates, they pay bills. People pontificate all the time about how New Hampshire’s utility rates are some of the highest in the nation, but that’s only part of the story. I aim to tell at least some of the rest of it.