PRC Confronts KCEC Community Abuse on Wed. Jan. 25

Prologue

Let truth and error grapple. Who ever knew truth to be beaten in a fair fight?
John Milton

My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. George Orwell

And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. Virginia Woolf

I am shocked, shocked to discover that KCEC, after getting a rate increase is now retroactively billing members prior to rate approval and has robbed or is in the process of robbing its members, except for the “6500” victims it has so far acknowledged in a PRC filing.

Below I offer up the closing paragraph of my plea, submitted to the Public Regulation Commission (PRC). The PRC generally relies on its staff to summarize and/or otherwise “compromise” with the regulated as is mentioned below by KCEC defense attorney Chuck Garcia re: his meeting off-the-record and behind closed doors with staff.

The Fox is always in the henhouse at the PRC.

So El Gringo Malo writes:

“A ruling in favor of KCEC on January 25 will impact members with more financial pain and induce further fear in members of their own Coop. Hope will be dashed if the PRC doesn’t confirm the alleged “crooked doings.” The rampant rate increase due to mismanagement, and the billing catastrophe due to predatory premeditation at KCEC will continue to roll over the community, as the multiplier effect passes from Coop to County, to Towns, to Water and Sanitation Districts, to Schools, to Hospitals, to local businesses, and,  finally, to las casas de Taos. The glamour and glitz of reputation hides poverty and an indigenous Hispanic culture, which is slowly dying, due to crimes of  “social justice” and the exploitation of La Gente [in Taos] by the home-owned Cooperative. Sin Verguenza!”

Recent history of Los Bandidos

The Kit Carson Electric Cooperative, allegedly “owned by those it serves,” has been hijacked by bandidos in the name of the “Traveling Trustees” and El Jefe, CEO Luis Reyes. Not content with the non-residential rate increase of Sept. 12 or the residential rate increase of Dec. 7, both approved of by the Public Regulation Commission, the CEO instructed staff to allegedly “retroactively” charge higher rates to commercial, government and homeowners for electric power received prior to PRC approval. This attempt to “illegally” collect a tariff and more specifically pick the pockets of its members appears to be a larcenous attack on the community.

El Jefe, along with local realtors, who worship at Manby’s monument in Kit Carson Park, are apparently enamored of  the dark side of Taos history.

Thanks to Interveners, Las Gorras Blancas, especially retired Los Alamos electrical engineer and designer of satellite systems, native Taosena Rose Des Georges, who filed objections with the PRC, as well as phone calls to the PRC by El Prado mayordomo, Intervener Arsenio Cordova, the PRC woke up…a little bit in the last month.

El Gringo Malo and Link Summers also filed motions to rehear and rebuttals to KCEC’s attempts not to rehear the case. Both Whaley and Summers draw attention to KCEC’s “misrepresentations” etc. during the “flawed” hearing process.

Fact gathering about retroactive billing has also proceeded with Communicados among other Interveners Jerome Lucero, Peggy Nelson, and Fabi Romero. A. Eugene Sanchez, seated comfortably in his armchair, pulls the strings and pushes his willing acolytes from behind the scenes.

La Rosa has been researching more than “100” Town of Taos bills from KCEC, as well as other residential and non-residential examples of over-billing. So far she and Whaley have yet to find a single bill, residential or non-residential that is free from skullduggery in their search for proof of Coop Abuse. Read your electric light bill and weep for us. Whaley has been promised a peek at Taos County bills, too.

KCEC defense attorney Garcia has admitted and referred to “6500 inadvertent billing errors” that will be corrected and given a credit in the next cycle.

But “inadvertent” does not characterize Reyes’s premeditated predatory scheme. According to research and direct conversations, El Jefe instructed his “billing department” to explain away the “inadvertent” error as the product of the “billing date” or an administrative-accounting procedure that has nothing to do with the “effective date” of the rate increase as published and posted on KCEC’s own web site with regard to the actual service and sale of electricity.

Hence KCEC admits to “error” for billing residents in the Nov. cycle but refuses to “pro-rate” Nov/Dec. bills or give any credit whatsoever to non-residential business and govt. customers who have gotten doubly screwed along the way.

The “service date” and “billing period” are tied together by the “effective date and advice notice” posted on KCEC’s own web site. Luis Reyes may think he’s  Bill Clinton but the meaning of “is” is “is.”

Coop Defense attorney Chuck Garcia of Cuddy McCarthy is trying to make the case behind closed doors to convince PRC staff that the KCEC “sting” should stick for more than 24,000 members. In a recent PRC filing he said that “I [Attorney Garcia] would also note for the Commission that Kit Carson met with NMPRC’s Utility Division Staff (“Staff ‘) on January 17, 2017, to address the billing issues.”

In his “chicanery” at the PRC Garcia argues that the billing date is sufficient, due to his interpretation of arcane PRC rules for the other 22,000 members of the Coop as long as there is even a single day in the Dec. service period that bridges the PRC Dec. 7 approval date.

Since one day equals a whole month in the mind of this law school grad, imagine how he figures up the legal bills for KCEC, estimated at more than $500,000 by insiders at the Coop for the last year.  One minute could easily equal one hour at what? $300 an hour?

I can’t even understand Garcia’s argument concerning the non-residential rates approved of by the PRC last Sept. 12 except to say this attorney’s interpretation of arcane PRC regs amounts to another example of Coop mayhem direct at Coop members by Manby’s ghostly acolyte, El Jefe.

Until there is a thorough accounting, we won’t know how many of the 28,000members have been “robbed” by Los Bandidos during the month prior to Sept. 12 (non-residential) or the month prior to Dec. 7 (residential). Los Bandidos and El Jefe will do anything, like Donald Trump, apparently, to get a buck and not pay for it.

But the buck stops with La Rosa et al on this paper trail for those who closely read their light bills.

The record “based upon evidence presented in over 407 pages of pre-filed testimony and exhibits and over the course of five (5) full days of hearing, 1,265 pages of hearing transcripts” plus files of “Interrogatories” not to mention 16 years of observation, off the record conversations with trustees comforts me in alluding to the mendacity and perversity produced by El Jefe and Los Bandidos.

We Interveners now have paper records of Reyes’ confessions in transcripts (2010 and 2016), applications, and confessions in interrogatories re: history going back to 2000 and a plethora of consolidated financial statements and secrets, the latter not worth the paper they are written on except that they, too, confirm how the members are getting screwed.

There is no polite way to characterize the Coop’s unethical actions.

Since the Coop hasn’t made Tier for 6 of the last 8 years, an RUS benchmark indicating stable financial condition, last summer the hearing Examiner asked CEO and El Jefe Luis Reyes if he was worried about his job.

He said he wasn’t worried.

Only Trustee Virgil Martinez voted the against rate increase. For his exercise of free speech and defiance of conformity at the Coop he was beaten up.

La Luisa Valerio-Mylet said she voted for the rate increase to save employee jobs.

But why has Manuel Medina, shown here with travel caption from last year, openly supported El Jefe’s disastrous leadership at the Coop for nigh on two decades?

Manuel Medina: to New Orleans but not to meetings?

Why has General David Torres supported the corruption at the Coop, shown below, with travel caption from last year?

Torres: to New Orleans