Rate changes “a criminal act”

A car dealership I know bought one hundred Cadillacs in anticipation of upcoming sales predictions. The dealership only sold 50 Aveos. The dealership is now in debt. So it asks the bank to adjust the loans to the customers who bought the Aveos to cover the cost of those Cadillacs. The bank, without notice or comments from the Aveo owners, adjusted those loans.

This dealership happens to be the only dealership in Alaska these customers can use. Now the Aveo owners are paying for Cadillacs they never received, with the blessing of the bank’s regulatory commission.

This story is fictional but replace cars with natural gas and it’s factual. This is exactly what the Regulatory Commission of Alaska has approved ENSTAR to do to us ENSTAR customers.

This is a crime that Governor Parnell must hold his regulatory commission responsible for. (I did not receive notice or have the opportunity to comment in writing to the commission prior to the commission approving the rate increase). There is a regulatory website just for this purpose. The judgment of the commission should be overruled until an investigation is completed into the legality of charging customers something they did not use. (This also is not a daycare center, so don’t go there ENSTAR.) This is more than a matter of “hurting our budgets.” This is a criminal act. Our local government through our media has asked us Alaskans to use less natural gas during certain times, indicated by a color code warning system.

Now that we have done what we were asked to do, this same local government is allowing our monopoly of ENSTAR to charge us for the gas we did not use. This is terribly wrong, criminal, and against the wishes of our Federal government to encourage less usage of carbon fossil fuels. Please everyone write to Governor Parnell, Rep. Don Young, Vice President Biden and President Obama about this illegal rate increase for a product we did not receive.

Jim Moberly

Wasilla