The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel has filed a motion to allow discovery into claims brought last week by 14 former Baltimore Gas and Electric employees to the Public Service Commission, which is deciding whether BGE should be allowed to raise energy rates.
The former employees claimed they had evidence of a particular employee lying about completing gas infrastructure inspections for years, falsifying documents to create a paper trail while he was on his boat. The employee was only suspended for one week without pay, according to the filing.
In a document signed by People’s Counsel David S. Lapp and two other attorneys in his office, the consumer advocates wrote that the former employees raised “serious questions about both the safety of BGE’s gas distribution system and the cost and prudency of BGE’s infrastructure work on the system.”
The questions of most concern to the office were:
- Has the infrastructure the allegedly fraudulent employee failed to inspect been re-inspected to full safety and engineering standards?
- Has BGE completed the infrastructure projects it needed to raise costs to cover?
- How much has inspection and remediation of previously uninspected infrastructure cost, and does BGE want to cover those costs by raising rates?
“To the extent that BGE cannot show that the work was completed or that it failed to exercise proper oversight, it would be appropriate for the Commission to deny cost recovery,” OPC wrote.
In order to answer those questions, the Office of the People’s Counsel requested the PSC revise the current schedule to allow for two rounds of discovery and an additional six weeks to file supplemental reply testimony.
BGE opposed the former employees’ filing on grounds that it was untimely and that some of the former employees weren’t BGE customers. The ones who were customers, it said, have their interests already represented by the OPC.
“The allegations presented by the Civil Plaintiffs are not relevant to and indeed have nothing to do with the narrow issues left to be determined in this final reconciliation. Instead, the Civil Plaintiffs have lodged a series of outrageous allegations against BGE, which BGE denies. Indeed, BGE contends that the statements in the Petition are filled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, and that BGE’s employment actions with respect to the Civil Plaintiffs were lawful and appropriate,” it wrote in its opposition.
The former employees are separately suing BGE for allegations of disparate treatment and racial harassment in the workplace. BGE argued their intervention was motivated by this civil suit.
“Indeed, counsel for the Civil Plaintiffs, having been admonished once and then ordered by the Circuit Court for Baltimore City to stop repeatedly attempting to litigate their case in the public, improperly seeks to use the Commission as a forum to promote the spurious allegations of the ongoing civil litigation. Critically, there has not been a determination on the merits of the Alston case. The Petition is an obvious attempt to draw attention and use the PSC process to promote the disputed allegations of a civil case,” it said.
BGE previously told The Baltimore Sun that while it couldn’t comment on the specific allegations due to the ongoing litigation, it “remains committed to providing safe and reliable energy and has one of the best safety records in the industry.”
The PSC has not yet released an order in response to the petition or either party’s response to it.
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