Modesto Irrigation District times rate hike to benefit board, rate payers be damned
If Modesto leaders...
- Quietly plotted for months to raise sales tax within the city
- Unveiled their complex plan one week before voting on the increase, giving people precious little time to study and absorb it
- Provided a single public meeting to hear everyone’s questions and concerns, immediately before taking a final vote
- Timed the whole thing to take place just after a major election but before new City Council members would take office
...people would be outraged. Understandably.
That’s not how we raise sales tax in California, as everyone knows who paid attention to Measure H and last Tuesday’s election.
But unbelievably, this scenario reflects the process being used by the Modesto Irrigation District with the goal of raising your electricity rates as soon as this Tuesday, Nov. 15.
The procedural contrast is stunning.
While City Hall must ask voters for permission to raise sales tax 1%, MID can raise residential power prices 9.6% with a single vote of its five-member board, two of whom are in lame duck status and can’t be held accountable by furious voters.
While the city openly spent months studying the idea of a tax bump — polling people and holding public hearings before even scheduling the ballot vote — MID blithely sprung this on us one day before the general election, when everyone’s attention was on political campaigns.
Knowing that a sales tax increase would be a hard sell to people already straining to pay more for gas, groceries and most everything else — plus a bond measure for Modesto’s high schools on the same ballot — the city recruited prominent business and civic figures to spend additional months persuading voters that Measure H was the right thing to do. MID, meanwhile, has to jump through none of those public relations hoops, because the board need not listen to one word of what ratepayers might say before jacking up power bills paid by everyone.
The upcoming MID board vote is not about doing the right thing. It’s being staged at this exact moment to allow incoming board members, who won’t be seated until early December, to escape blame while providing maximum cover to ongoing board members, who can hope voters’ memories will fade by the time they face re-election in two years.
On Wednesday, board member-elect Janice Keating (who won a seat only hours before) sent an open letter asking the board to postpone a vote until she and others joining the panel have time to study the proposal “and explore options that don’t increase costs for struggling ratepayers.” She is 100% right.
On Thursday, Modesto Vice Mayor David Wright sent a note to MID leaders with the same request, asking to lay out for everyone to see exactly what the district has done to keep costs in check “during this time of higher prices everywhere.” Wright is 100% right.
Before and at Tuesday’s MID board meeting — and hopefully after, if the board wises up and stops the railroading with a reasonable delay — the district must explain every bit of its 239-page Cost of Service Report. That’s the technical document the utility will use to justify its rate increase.
Make your case, MID
Justification is conceivable. For many reasons, it’s been 10 years since the last MID rate increase — a comparative eternity in the utility world.
Keeping a high credit rating is important, but that’s hard to do if the district’s cash balance dips too low. And that could happen, partly because the cost of natural gas which MID burns to create energy shot up when Russia invaded Ukraine, and stayed up, and the district has few options to bring in more revenue.
Of course, charging farmers something closer to the true cost of irrigation, rather than subsidizing farm water by overcharging electricity customers, would be a good step in the right direction. It would make legal sense and common sense for the MID board to consider water and electricity increases at the same time.
If Tuesday’s proposed power rate increase is more about covering higher salary demands of already well-paid MID employees, that’s something else. If MID officials hope to retain trust, they must be completely transparent about this, including status of labor talks.
Readers who have followed over the years MID’s legal trouble with rates will recall that a judge in 2020 ruled that the district indeed had been stealing from Peter to pay Paul — using electricity income to subsidize its farm water service. MID’s appeal has yet to be resolved, but the memory of shenanigans endures.
One would think MID would bend over backward to restore credibility. Yet here they are staging a vote politically timed to benefit board members while screaming insensitivity to everyone else.
This story was originally published November 9, 2022 at 4:00 AM.
