MO gas users. Will you be paying for yours and someone else's too?

I posted this in G.D. and Kansas forums, but thought I'd post it here as well (since you're right across the street from me!).

I tried to find an electronic form of this article, which appeared today in the "Business Section" of the Kansas City Star, but either there won’t be one or it hasn’t been posted on the internet yet.

So not only are Kansas gas users going to be paying more for inflated gas prices, but now we’ll be expected to pay for the ones who don’t (or can't).

From Kansas City Star, January 27, 2006, Business (Section C, page 1)

Cost-of-gas charge gets expanded role

By STEVE EVERLY
The Kansas City Star

Gas utility customers in Kansas will automatically pay the uncollected gas costs owed by other utility customers in a program quietly approved by state regulators last summer.

The measure, which is being pushed by utilities in other states including Missouri, expands the role of the cost-or-gas rider or purchased gas adjustment, which is already on gas bills and covers wholesale gas costs and some other related expenses such as storage fees. The charge has traditionally been paid by the customer using the fuel.

But Kansas, one of only a handful of states that so far have made the move, is expanding the charge’s role to include collecting unpaid gas costs owed by other customers. Those gas costs account for about 70 percent of an annual gas bill.

The program became effective last fall and is being phased in: it is eventually expected to add millions to gas utility bills in the state. The utilities estimated, using 2004 figures, that the program could add $4 million to bills annually. Critics say that figure is bound to be much higher.

Expanding the cost-of-gas charge, say the utilities, is necessary to replace a system that has allowed some uncollected debt to be covered by money embedded in other rates that are part of people’s gas bills. Whatever could not be collected had to be written off, which reduced profits, and the utilities had to rely on future rate cases to try to increase the amount of bad debt they could recover.

The new system is necessary, the utilities say, because the rising cost of gas has increased the amount of bad debt. The utilities want to be able to recover hose costs more quickly and more fully.

(22 more “paragraphs” in print form)

Whatever happened to the “cost of doing business?”

Gas consumers in other states may want to see if this kind of program is in the process of being "quietly approved" by your state regulators.

:)

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/13721531.htm