Yet another back-and-forth round of filings took place this week before the Oklahoma Supreme Court in the constitutional challenge of the February 2021 Regulated Utility Consumer Protection Act that allowed the use of ratepayer-backed bonds to help utilities recover their storm costs.
After Attorney General John O’Connor’s filing of non-intervention in the challenge filed by former legislator Mike Reynolds, a response came from Reynolds who again disagreed with the attorney general’s claim that the use of securitization bonds would result in customer savings.
“To be clear, there are no customer savings in any of the ODFA’s ratepayer-backed bond proposals!” declared Reynolds, referring to the original request of the Oklahoma Development Finance Authority for Supreme Court permission to proceed with the sale of bonds in OG&E’s $800 million request.
He called the Act “unlawful because it is self-defeating” and its goal of customer savings cannot be met by the expensive mechanism it offers.
“It is like authorizing the State to hire a licensed electrician to change a light bulb or unplug a coffee maker,” he wrote in his filing, adding, “The considerable additional expense of hiring outside operatives to do what can already be accomplished without their help is financially unjustifiable.”
Reynolds urged the Court to look at other plans undertaken by Panhandle Gas and Canadian Valley Electric Cooperative Inc., firms that are unregulated public utilities and chose other methods to finance their storm costs.
“CVEC secured better financing terms on its own than with the ‘help’ of the ODFA’s extravagant ratepayer-backed bond mechanism,” he stated.
Reynolds filed a constitutional challenge in January to the storm recovery act claiming it violates the Oklahoma Constitution and amounts to a change of the Constitution without a vote of the people.
Click below to view the latest Reynolds filing
file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/1051911867-20220317-141508-%20(1).pdf