There’s a bill before the Maine Legislature’s Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee to have the Public Utilities Commission determine how utilities are performing whenever they file for rate increases. The idea behind the bill, L.D. 2172, should sound familiar … because it’s already being done. Gov. Janet Mills and the Legislature passed a law in 2022 that makes utilities more accountable by assessing their performance and penalizing them when they don’t measure up.

So the PUC is already evaluating utilities in areas many of us ratepayers care about — things like reliability, repair times, billing accuracy and responsiveness. The incentive for the utilities to do well is financial. The PUC only rewards them when they succeed. When they don’t, their shareholders have to pay the penalties. We’ll learn soon enough how the utilities stack up because the PUC will be issuing its first report cards in a few months.

It seems this new bill does nothing more than mess around with a wheel that’s already been invented. It makes sense to me that we first see how the wheel works before we go redesigning it.

Ray Hinckley

Manchester