DaytonDailyNews.com

Ohio utility consumer advocates have been trying for years to get state regulators to investigate whether investor-owned utilities, including Dayton Power and Light Co., have been boosting corporate profits at the expense of the kind of preventative maintenance the advocates say can lessen the impact of major storms like the one that ripped through the region on Sept. 14.

They are currently pushing for transparent, statewide standards for maintenance, such as trimming tree limbs away from power lines, that would replace difficult-to-understand numerical targets that are set in negotiations between Public Utilities Commission of Ohio staff and each utility.

"It's not to say these things are responsible for 75 mile an hour winds," said Ryan Lippe of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel. But "we ought to absolutely ask the question of whether some of this (damage) could have been prevented if more maintenance had been done throughout the year."

Near-hurricane force winds raked across the state Sept. 14, knocking out electric power to about 2 million homes and businesses, including 300,000 of DP&L's 515,000 customers. A DP&L spokesman said the utility may ask the PUCO for permission to charge consumers for the as-yet-unknown costs of repairing storm damage.

Consumer advocates say that damage may have been lessened if utilities paid more attention to power lines and less to the bottom line.

Major Ohio utilities "haven't been doing enough (maintenance) for 15 years," said David Reinbolt, executive director of Ohio Partners for Affordable Energy. "It's really pretty much a statewide problem. We've been paying for it in rates. They just haven't been spending the money we've been paying them."

DP&L and Duke Energy said they do regular maintenance and tree-clearing on their lines, but the destructive power of last weekend's windstorm was unprecedented for this region.

"The routine trimming of the lines certainly does help ensure the reliability of the line ... but not when we get to the significance of the storm that we saw Sunday," Duke Energy spokesman Tim Pettit said. "When a very mature oak tree falls, it takes down everything in its path, whether it's a car, a house or a utility pole."

To improve their financial performance for Wall Street during the 1990s, utilities closed customer service centers, laid off maintenance personnel and cut back on maintenance spending, Reinbolt said. They haven't restored maintenance budgets to adequate levels, said Reinbolt, who often challenges utility rate hike requests before the PUCO.

"They keep trying to get customers to pay for the remedial maintenance that they should have been doing," he said.

Ellis Jacobs, senior attorney for Advocates for Basic Legal Equality in Dayton, agrees with the consumers' counsel that PUCO should investigate. "Once things settle down, it would be appropriate for the PUCO to investigate why these outages were so widespread. And they should look to see if there was any failure of preventative maintenance which contributed to the severity of the problem."

PUCO Chairman Alan Schriber said consumer groups would have to have "an incredibly compelling reason" to warrant such an investigation.

"I am very, very hesitant to tie the episode of last week to (lack of) ordinary maintenance," Schriber said. "A tree falls and takes out some wires. What can you do?"

Maintenance standards that have penalties with teeth would help, said Rick Reese, an attorney for the consumers' counsel. "We want standards so we know every inch of every circuit is trimmed every so many years."

Ohio utilities must have a maintenance plan approved by PUCO staff, but "if they don't follow their plan, all they have to do is say they didn't follow it and file another plan," Reese said. "There are no automatic penalties for noncompliance."

The Ohio Consumers' Counsel unsuccessfully called for PUCO investigations into utility maintenance in 2004 and 2005 after PUCO staff slammed American Electric Power of Columbus for numerous rule violations, but the PUCO commissioners agreed to a watered-down settlement. The commission declined to investigate.

In its 2004 request for an investigation, the counsel also cited the August 2003 power grid failure that knocked out service to more than 50 million people in eight northeastern states and the Canadian province of Ontario.

The blackout was caused in part by inadequate vegetation control by FirstEnergy in northern Ohio.

DP&L also had a tree-related outage on its transmission system.

The counsel said DP&L had cut its maintenance budget for overhead transmission lines from $2 million in 1998 to $812,000 in 2002.

"This significant decline in expenditures for maintenance may well result in reliability problems in the DP&L service territory," counsel attorneys wrote in 2004.

Jacobs unsuccessfully asked the PUCO to keep a close eye on DP&L's maintenance efforts after its parent company in 2007 settled a civil lawsuit it had filed against three former executives by paying the executives $25 million.

DP&L spokesman Tom Tatham said because of the pressing issues of restoring power last week he wasn't able to immediately provide information on the company's distribution line maintenance budget. DP&L has said in PUCO filings that there's no problem with its system maintenance.

Tatham said DP&L always evaluates its response after a major storm, and will do so once the current outages are restored.

Consumer activists say they, too, will be evaluating the utilities' response.

"We're going to be asking a lot of questions about this," Reese said. "Certainly, tragedies happen. (But) you have to make sure everybody was doing their due diligence throughout the year. If not, it may be a systemic problem and not just an issue of the wind."

How to contact DP&L, PUCO

DP&L: www.dpandl.com, (937) 331-3900 or (800) 433-8500

Public Utilities Commission of Ohio: www.puco.ohio.gov, (800) 686-7826