LNP/LancasterOnline. March 8, 2024.
Editorial: PPL must improve customer service — and should be required to compensate customers for billing fiasco
PPL is Lancaster County’s primary electricity provider, with approximately 272,000 customers here. So its billing failures are a big deal.
But the frustrations being felt by PPL customers over the company’s billing screwups can be understood by anyone who’s struggled in recent years to get a human being on the phone to discuss a customer service issue.
This statistic reported by Scheid gets to the heart of this saga: From the end of December 2022 through April 2023, a whopping 41% of calls to PPL were abandoned without customers being able to reach a representative.
If it were possible to turn customer anger and frustration into electricity, PPL could have powered a whole Pennsylvania city.
As Scheid reported, the proposed settlement would require PPL to pay a $1 million civil penalty and absorb more than $16 million in related costs. According to the settlement, PPL has refunded approximately $1 million to customers statewide who were overbilled.
Some Americans talk about wanting to see deregulation and small government, but the reality is that we need oversight of utilities such as PPL. We wouldn’t know the scale of PPL’s customer service failures were it not for the PUC investigation.
From Scheid’s reporting: “Of the more than 860,000 estimated bills issued between December 2022 and May 2023, the investigation revealed that 67.31% (261,104 customers) of the bills had an estimate 10% or more above the customers’ actual usage. Nearly 48,000 customer bills were based on an estimate different from actual usage by more than 50%.”
That is terrible.
In an interview with LNP ' LancasterOnline, Christina Hausner of East Hempfield Township accurately pointed out that shoddy service erodes faith in a utility.
In her comment to the PUC, Hausner noted that she has no quarrel with the monetary settlement, but believes that “in addition to the monetary terms ... PPL should be required to augment its customer service and practices by which it communicates with customers and processes their questions and complaints.” She wrote that “PPL must provide an avenue other than an understaffed phone number to process complaints and questions.”
Hausner, the former Lancaster County solicitor, is absolutely right.
Audrey A. Geib, corporate secretary of the Manheim Historical Society, wrote in her comment to the PUC that she had prepared a spreadsheet showing that her organization had been overcharged for more than 7,000 kilowatt hours.
“Some adjustments were made by PPL, but due to the complexity of their billing, I was not always able to match the adjustments to a specific bill,” Geib wrote. “Many of the bills we received did not have dates on them. Also, their website did not allow me to access prior year bills for information to complete my work.”
Geib clearly has the technical and analytical skills to track PPL’s billing errors, but even she was stymied by the utility’s website.
Imagine being a PPL customer without the technology and ability to put together a spreadsheet or to ferret out billing mistakes.
You shouldn’t need any particular expertise to figure out whether you’re being overcharged for electricity, or to seek a remedy for being overcharged.
And you should be able to speak to a human being on the phone when you reach out to a utility’s customer service department. Some of the comments to the PUC were written by hand, on loose-leaf paper or notepaper.
PPL isn’t a small, family-run business with limited resources. A company of 1,700 employees must be able to effectively communicate not only with customers who use email, but those who still rely on their phones.
In a four-page handwritten letter to the PUC, Lancaster County resident Lucy Tristani described herself as a 93-year-old woman getting by on a limited income. She noted that keeping up with the charges had been “difficult, to say the least.” The ordeal, she wrote, had exacted an indescribable emotional toll.
It is, she wrote, “incredible” that PPL “can create problems of such magnitude as to disrupt the lives of thousands.” PPL “has to be made accountable and the thousands of customers should be recompensed for all we have been through.”
We strongly agree.
So does PPL customer Jeff Lesher of Reinholds, who noted in an LNP ' LancasterOnline letter to the editor Wednesday that the PUC is “doing nothing” for those “who sacrificed other monthly bills to make the payments PPL demanded ... and incurred costs associated with delaying credit card bills and other monthly bills.”
The Pennsylvania Office of Consumer Advocate expressed similar concerns.
In a letter to the PUC, that office urged that customers be fully compensated. It also recommended that the PUC require PPL to complete a root cause analysis to determine how the billing system malfunctions impacted customer balances, service terminations and late fees. As Scheid reported, “The Office of Consumer Advocate also recommended that between $500,000 and $750,000 of the $1 million penalty be directed to the Hardship Fund and that like the civil penalty, PPL be prohibited from claiming any charitable deduction for this contribution.”
This all makes perfect sense.
We urge the PUC to increase its oversight of PPL in the wake of this debacle. And we ask state lawmakers to redirect their energy from ginned-up culture wars to advocating for constituents put through the ringer by PPL.
And PPL: Do better. A lot better.
___
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. March 12, 2024.
Editorial: Pa. prisons must make special provisions for mental illness
America’s bloated prison population has long held many of our society’s most vulnerable, including the mentally and cognitively impaired. Over 40% of all inmates have a history of mental health disorders, and only 60% of those are receiving treatment, according to a 2016 inmate survey.
About a quarter of state prisoners have been diagnosed with bipolar or anxiety disorder, and around 14% with PTSD. Another estimated 4% have autism and 25% have other cognitive impairments.
Inmates with these challenges find incarceration even more difficult than others. When held in a general prison population, they frequently endure harassment, manipulation and isolation, as well as mistreatment and neglect from the correctional system itself.
And some inmates die without the proper attention to their disabilities. That was the case for Anthony Talotta, an autistic man who was booked into Allegheny County Jail in 2022 after an altercation at his group home. He died of sepsis after 10 days. Correctional officers and a doctor with multiple revoked licenses neglected his care.
We have another way to address the needs of inmates with disabilities, being tested in a western Pennsylvania state correctional facility. A 3-year-old unit at State Correctional Institution Albion has a wing dedicated to serving this population in a thoughtful effort headed up by a counselor, not a correctional officer. It is the only such facility in Pennsylvania.
Known as the Neurodevelopmental Residential Treatment Unit, the space protects inmates with mental or cognitive disabilities. Sensory rooms, with dimmed lights and simple activities, help inmates who are overstimulated. Nonverbal prisoners are given ample opportunity to communicate.
The obvious need
The need for these kinds of facilities is obvious; The American criminal justice system, after decades of expansion at the expense of mental health facilities and social programs, has become the last resort for people with mental illness.
The type of treatment available to prisoners with cognitive and mental impairments is hard to estimate, as all correctional facilities have their own protocols and are closed to the public. Still, the need dwarfs the availability. The SCI-Albion facility, about 30 miles Southwest of Erie, only has room for about 45 men in its specialized unit.
Around 40,000 state and federal prisoners are currently held across Pennsylvania. That means 16,000 may need treatment.
Some advocates are trying to improve conditions through the courts, but the system can take years to enact change — and only if the suits are successful. A recent lawsuit against the state’s Department of Corrections from the Abolitionist Law Center highlighted how seriously mentally ill people are still being held in solitary confinement long-term, despite a 2015 statewide ban on the practice. But keeping them out of solitary confinement does not solve the problems of their being kept with the general prison population.
SCI-Albion’s unit has been running for three years now. That should be ample time to assess the effects on the inmates using the program.
Change can start with an improved understanding of what disabled inmates need and what practices will help them. It may be the only way to prove that a rehabilitative approach works better than a punitive one, and to ensure that more facilities like SCI-Albion’s are built in the future.
___
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. March 12, 2024.
Editorial: Who do we thank for freedom of information?
Ask who wrote the Declaration of Independence, and most people will promptly respond with Thomas Jefferson.
Ask about the Constitution, and Broadway enthusiasts and history buffs may wax poetic about Alexander Hamilton.
But who do we credit with the Bill of Rights? That honor goes to James Madison.
The fourth president was a Founding Father, but he never was enthusiastic about the powers of government. Instead, he was an advocate of the liberties he believed were intrinsic. He took those unspoken privileges of citizenship and codified them in the first 10 changes to the Constitution — the Bill of Rights.
Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom of the press. The right to bear arms. The right to a jury trial. The right to remain silent. These are just a few of the concepts we hold dear that were written into our history in Madison’s Bill of Rights.
Then there is the freedom of information. It isn’t specifically delineated, but that doesn’t matter. The Ninth Amendment tells us rights not specifically spelled out or limited are still in the hands of the people.
Everything about the founding documents of our country tells us that we have the ability to hold our leaders to account. It isn’t just a right. It’s not even a responsibility. It’s a requirement of citizenship. Our government isn’t top-down like some oppressive monarchies intended to oppress. It is grassroots, growing from the people.
Because of that, the information of government — from meetings to costs to paper trails — is the right of the people to hold, study and question.
This week is National Sunshine Week, culminating in Freedom of Information Day on Saturday, Madison’s birthday. While this is championed by news organizations everywhere, we don’t do so for ourselves. This isn’t National Newspaper Week — that’s in October.
National Sunshine Week is about the right of the people to their own information. It might not have a musical or even an amendment, but it’s still something to sing about.
___
Scranton Times-Tribune. March 11, 2024.
Editorial: Secrecy still pervades Pennsylvania state government, but Spotlight PA is fighting back
Politicians in Harrisburg come and go, and political majorities shift over time. But one enduring constant no matter who’s in power is a reflexive inclination to shield information from the very people who pay the bills — we, the taxpayers.
Our state and local governments exist to serve our communities. We pay our taxes each year, and in return, we the taxpayers have a right to know what our government is doing, how it’s spending our money and whether we’re getting the services we deserve.
But there are fewer and fewer journalists on the front lines, keeping government honest — and when officials don’t face questions or requests for public records on a regular basis, they increasingly lean toward the side of secrecy.
We know all too well what can happen when powerful institutions are left to their own devices. That’s why Spotlight PA’s work across Pennsylvania promoting transparency and openness is so vital to the health of our state. And that’s why we need your support to keep up this fight in a vital year — and right now, your contribution will be doubled.
This week is Sunshine Week, a nationwide effort each year to call attention to the importance of government transparency and access to public records.
If you’re not familiar with our work, Spotlight PA is an independent, nonpartisan, and nonprofit newsroom covering the state Capitol and urgent statewide issues. We share all of our journalism at no cost with 100+ community news outlets across the state.
In the past year, Spotlight PA has written stories about Gov. Josh Shapiro’s use of unusually strict nondisclosure agreements for members of his transition team, and his refusal to publicize the private donors who had funded his inaugural festivities — a departure from his two immediate predecessors.
The governor refuses to make public his daily schedule, obscuring many of the details about who he meets with and what they discuss. And when a top aide was accused of sexual harassment, his administration settled and barred all parties from talking about it.
And then there are the endless records fights with the state Legislature, which itself has quietly paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past five years to settle sexual harassment and other claims against lawmakers and staffers, often including secrecy clauses and other provisions that prevent public disclosure of the agreement.
Spotlight PA is also suing the Legislature to win access to emails between lawmakers and lobbyists as guaranteed by the state’s public records law. In addition, we’re actively fighting on your behalf in other matters before the courts to ensure our powerful institutions abide by the state’s public records and meeting laws:
In July, a court ruled in favor of Spotlight PA and partner The Caucus, part of LNP Media Group in Lancaster, that the legislature cannot categorically redact the reasons for hiring private lawyers based on attorney-client privilege, but must instead meet the burden of withholding records on a case-by-case basis.
In December, Spotlight PA sued the Penn State Board of Trustees over what the newsroom contends are violations of Pennsylvania’s open meetings law.
Each and every day, Spotlight PA reporters across the state are fighting in big and little ways to track your tax dollars and understand what our government is doing. How do we have the time and resources to do such important work?
That’s thanks to you.
Our journalism and the future of Spotlight PA depend on your support. Make a tax-deductible gift of any amount at spotlightpa.org/donate, and as a special bonus, all contributions will be DOUBLED thanks to a matching gift from The Benter Foundation in Pittsburgh, which is committed to ensuring an honest and ethical government.
If you’d like to donate by check, send it to: Spotlight PA, 312 Walnut St., #11728, Harrisburg, PA 17108-1728. I hope we can count on you to help Spotlight PA continue to fight for government transparency, hand-in-hand with our newsroom partners.
END