CLEVELAND PUBLIC POWER RATES... SOMEBODY FINALLY NOTICES!

I don't have a subscription to Crain's Cleveland Business, so I didn't notice until today the page-three article by Jay Miller that begins:

City-owned Cleveland Public Power has lost its traditional price advantage against longtime rival Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., a unit of FirstEnergy Corp.

Which is too bad, because I'm quoted in the second and third paragraphs as the discoverer of CPP's price parity with CEI.

The article is here but it's subscription-only, so I can't quote a lot of it without too much typing. But I'll give you this much:

City utilities director Julius Ciacia and CPP commissioner James Majer acknowledged last week that Mr. Callahan's price comparison is accurate. The city's rates and those charged by CEI to city residents now are about the same, the officials said, though they fluctuate on an almost month-to-month basis... Whether a customer in Cleveland uses CPP or CEI, however, the rates are widely regarded as the highest paid in the state.

Now I've been blogging about CPP's rates to a readership of (maybe) two hundred of you for more than a year, so of course I'm grateful to see the story finally break in the real media. Unfortunately, most of Miller's story lays out an "explanation" of CPP's rate inflation that comes straight from city officials, with little fact-checking. Here's paragraph four:

The rates of the two utilities have converged because of CEI's response to electric deregulation in Ohio and efforts by CPP to upgrade its system, which had fallen into disrepair.

Now reading that paragraph you'd have to infer two things: First, that CEI's "response to deregulation" was to lower its rates, bringing them closer to CPP's; and second, that the rising components of CPP's rates have been capital investment and maintenance. And indeed the rest of the story (including quotes from Ciacia and Councilmen Roosevelt Coats and Jay Westbrook) supports those two general ideas... neither of which is true.

I'll go into both of those subjects in the next couple of days. But for now, it's nice to see that the City of Cleveland has finally 'fessed up to having the highest electric rates in the state. A good first step...