Modesto Irrigation customers kicked in the teeth again: No class-action refund | Opinion
It’s a crying shame that families and businesses overpaying for electricity from the Modesto Irrigation District — most people reading this — won’t get a dime back, according to a judge’s recent ruling.
In his Feb. 21 decision, Stanislaus Superior Court Judge Sonny Sandhu agreed with a 2019 class-action ruling that MID had been overcharging its power customers. Both calls were absolutely right, by all legal and moral reasoning.
Any government agency forcing customers of one service (power) to subsidize another (farm water) is doing it wrong. It’s a simple matter of fairness and, in recent years, of state law.
MID leaders have known about the inequity since at least 1995, when they quietly began a bookkeeping trick designed to hide the fact that MID was transferring tens of millions of dollars from the district’s electricity side to its irrigation side.
After The Bee unveiled the practice, the district in 2013 dropped the rationale in its internal bookkeeping but continued to charge the same amount anyway.
In the class-action lawsuit, the district tried arguing that irrigation water is legally subsidized — not by overcharging for power, but from revenue MID gets by wholesaling surplus electricity on the open market. That was nothing more than another bookkeeping trick, and Stanislaus Judge Roger Beauchesne called MID on it the same day he retired, on New Year’s Eve 2019.
But Beauchesne did not say how much the utility’s charade had cost ratepayers, leaving that for another judge to decide. On Wednesday, Sandhu split the baby — confirming the evil of overcharging while declining to give customers a refund.
Sandhu must have known this would be viewed as a pyrrhic victory. He noted that the lawsuits forced MID in 2018 to do special studies “to properly explain and justify its rate-making activity. (The lawsuit) put processes — which had previously been opaque — in the spotlight, creating much needed transparency. (The) success (of those suing) in this regard should be acknowledged — they prevailed, if not in whole, at least in significant part.”
That pat on the head from a judge in a milestone ruling is extraordinary.
Sandhu went on to order that MID pay the attorneys’ fees of those suing: Dave Thomas, who has moved to Tennessee, and Andrew Hobbs.
“The lawyers are saying if you get a victory, you take it,” Thomas said Friday by telephone. “My question is how did what we win help the ratepayer — the waitress with three kids working two jobs, the vet limping around who can’t get good health care?
“Is this better than nothing? Unquestionably. Did it show that MID is a bunch of rascals? You could read that into it. But what the hell?”
They get you coming and going
MID board members met Friday to discuss the decision behind closed doors, and emerged with no report, district spokeswoman Melissa Williams said.
It should be noted that three of the five board members — Bob Frobose, John Boer and Janice Keating — were elected in November, years after the lawsuits were brought. The three were sworn in only days after Larry Byrd, Nick Blom and outgoing directors raised electricity rates nearly 10%.
On Feb. 14, the board indicated willingness to raise farmers’ irrigation rates at an April 11 meeting. That absolutely should happen, as growers pay only a fraction of what their water is worth, according to the district’s own studies.
But MID is tired of providing storm drainage in canals to Modesto City Hall for free. If the city agrees, families soon could pay more for that service on their water, sewer and trash bills.
In sum, 131,000 families and businesses — many struggling to make ends meet — are being hit with higher electricity prices, might soon pay for storm drains and are getting no power refund even though two judges said MID treated them unfairly.
No wonder people get fed up with government.
