Hiding Data – DeSantis Staffed Public Service Commission Drops Requirement for Electricity Companies to Tell How Many Disconnections Due to Non Payment
March 7, 2023 | Sundance |
It’s a local Florida story and multi-faceted. However, for the bigger national audience the issue that should be considered is thatRon DeSantis and the Florida Republican party took $9+ million in campaign contributions from state energy providers, then approved the biggest electricity rate hikes in Florida.
Additionally, and more obscure in the outcome, thePublic Service Commission (Public Utility Commission, or PUC), after being filled with DeSantis appointees, informed the electricity providers they no longer needed to report the number of residents who were disconnected from utility service due to nonpayment.
One could make the intellectual and political argument, the scale of disconnection -which is quite alarming- would be averse to the interests of Governor DeSantis seeking a higher office.
Like much of the country,electricity rates in Florida have skyrocketed with the increase in natural gas prices. However, unlike much of the country, most Florida residents have only one option for electrical utility power. The rate of disconnection in Florida amid lower income and working families is far greater than almost any other state.Florida is quickly becoming a class-driven society with haves and have-nots.
FLORIDA – […] In November 2021, Florida’s Public Service Commission (PUC) issued a memorandum allowing electric utilities to stop disclosing their shutoff data. The memorandum, which reversed the commission’s September 2020 decision to collect the data to track the pandemic’s effects on utility customers, came after DeSantis stacked the board with his appointees. The move came less than a month after commission members approved the largest electric rate hike in Florida’s history, resulting in a 20 percent increase in costs to residential ratepayers.
Now it’s impossible to know how many customers have been disconnected from their electric utilities for being unable to pay their increasing power bills. If that disconnection rate continued, noted the report, NextEra would have shut off 1.2 million customers in 2022. But we do not know the total, because the DeSantis-appointed Florida PUC allowed them to hide the data.
[…] In early December, the Bailout Watch report noted,Florida regulators approved a fuel rider, or a cost increase tied to the price of fuelallowing utilities to pass the cost of higher fuel prices to consumers, without affecting their enormous profits. Company executives have been handsomely rewarded for such political wins. Top executives at NextEra gave themselves a 59 percent raise between 2020 to 2021. (read more)
One of the reasons I became confident last year that RonDeSantis was planning a 2024 presidential bid, was the one-and-done-nature of his focus.
Florida working class residents are under extreme economic duress as a result of unavoidableincreases in energy costs (home cooling), massive increases in insurance costs (tripling of homeowners, doubling of auto), skyrocketing housing costs (largest in nation).
Throughout 2022 GovernorDeSantis focused almost exclusively on social issue constructs, and the economic policies of Florida -while more challenging to address- have been exclusively unattended. From the 30,000 ft level, the disconnect in executive priority becomes more explainable when you consider the management team was assembling apolicy strategy for media and public consumption.
Throughout my research and review on the managers and background of DeSantis team, it just became obvious (mid-summer ’22) there was a longer-term plan in the background, created in the latter part of 2021 and everything thereafter -asevere emphasis on social issues- was a political management and national branding approach. If you overlay the hindsight timelines, including the PUC story, one can see the proactive political construct to control any negative issues.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/03/07/hiding-data-desantis-staffed-public-service-commission-drops-requirement-for-electricity-companies-to-tell-how-many-disconnections-due-to-non-payment/