Here’s the latest attempt by Mississippi Power to foist something over on its customers: It wants us to bear the cost of $3 million in corporate jet expenses.
Thankfully, the Mississippi Public Service Commission is holding that up while it works to clarify a rule saying utilities can’t include the costs of private aircraft in their rates.
“Customers shouldn’t pay under any circumstances for those type expenses. That’s the bottom line of it. If company executives want to ride around in a corporate jet, they ought to pay for it, not their customers,” Brandon Presley, the PSC’s Northern District commissioner, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
Presley, a populist Democrat with a penchant for homespun phrases, acknowledged there are legitimate reasons to fly but said utilities should only pay for what a regular airline ticket costs like the average Mississippian, “not some diamond-studded corporate jet.”
Admittedly, $3 million is not that much in the grand scheme of the rates of Mississippi Power, which provides service in most of the city of Columbia, although not surrounding areas in Marion County. Overall it supplies power in 23 counties in southeast Mississippi, so you can imagine the price of the light bill for every home and business from Meridian to the Coast dwarfs $3 million.
Yet there is lingering suspicion of Mississippi Power because of its actions regarding the Kemper plant. It tried for years to force its customers to pay the multi-billion-dollar bill for that failed science experiment before the PSC finally forced it to eat the more than $6 billion cost for the lignite plant that never worked. Suspicions are that Mississippi Power is going to try to find a way to push that $6 billion on the ratepayers.
Presley, for his part, says the requirement that Mississippi Power can’t charge its customers for Kemper is “strong as 10 acres of garlic” and that the corporate jet rule has nothing to do with that. Hopefully he’s right.
As far as the jets, the PSC passed a rule in 2011 at Presley’s behest banning private aircraft expenditures unless the utility could show they were “reasonable” and beneficial to ratepayers. It required an independent cost/benefit analysis by an entity selection by the PSC and a detailed flight log of each trip to prove they were for utility business purposes only.
In making its recent request for $3 million in jet expenses, Mississippi Power made the argument that the rule is unclear, according to Presley. He said he wants to clarify it now with a goal of not having these requests come up again.
The PSC is currently taking comments on the rule and hopes to have it adopted in the early fall.
The way these things work is if things are going well, extra expenses like a corporate jet are tolerable, but when times get tight you have to cut those unnecessary expenditures. Most businesses operate that way.
The problem here is that things are not going well for Mississippi Power. Aside from Kemper, its prices are much higher than others in the region. David Dismukes, executive director of the Center for Energy Studies at Louisiana State University, provided a home power cost comparison in 2017 testimony to the Mississippi Public Utilities Staff. It showed a cost of $85.06 for Mississippi Power versus $40.76 for Entergy Mississippi.
When you’re already charging your customers much more than their neighbors in the rest of the state, it’s hard to justify cruising the friendly skies in a corporate jet at their expense. The PSC is right to stop this, but it should go a step further and begin serious consideration of ending the electricity monopoly.
Give people in southeast Mississippi the opportunity to buy their power from other utilities, and the downward effect on Mississippi Power’s rates will be remarkable, I predict.
Charlie Smith is editor and publisher of The Columbian-Progress. Reach him at csmith@columbianprogress.com.
