During the height of
the COVID pandemic, Connecticut's major utilities took hundreds of customers to
court over unpaid bills – even garnishing their wages. On Monday, state
regulators spent hours grilling them about the practice.
A state watchdog
agency believes the collections violated a statewide ban on utility shut-offs
that ended last summer. In March, the Office of Consumer Counsel asked for
an
investigation. The
Public Utilities Regulatory Authority held Monday’s hearing as part of the
probe.
According to documents filed in the case, United Illuminating secured
158 court judgments against customers and 36 wage garnishments in 2020 and
2021. During that same period, Eversource won 45 court cases and 13
garnishments.
All those cases began before the pandemic. Once COVID hit,
utilities stopped initiating new legal proceedings, which remains their policy
today.
"We were not ordered to do that,” said Daniel Traynor, Eversource’s acting
credit and collections director. “We did that voluntarily out of an abundance
of caution for everything that was going on at that time."
Utilities say they were allowed to collect past due bills – even during the
shut-off moratorium. In the meantime, UI says it's taking a "soft
approach" to collections, including more flexible payment plans.
"If the customers were saying, 'No, I can't
afford it,' they were, 'OK fine' and maybe they were checking back in three
months or six months,” said Kathy Wasilnak, the collections supervisor for UI’s
parent company, Avangrid.
PURA expect to issue a proposed decision in September and a final
one a month later.