Sedona AZ (July 6, 2015) – The following is a letter to the SedonaEye.com editor:

Incompetence and Misinformation
at the ACC’s “Consumer Services” Information
Perspective by Warren Woodward
Sedona, Arizona

The ACC is tasked with the responsibility to protect AZ ratepayers by weighing the costs and benefits of all state utility requests.

Among the emails and documents I recently received via a Public Records Request of the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) were some complaint forms from the ACC’s Consumer Services section. Whenever someone calls or emails the ACC with a complaint or question about a utility, these forms are used to record the complaint or question as well as the ACC’s response.

Below is one that unfortunately contains typical ACC misinformation: A Tucson Electric Power (TEP) customer called in with the following question as described by Jenny Gomez who evidently took the call at the ACC: “She wants to know if these meters will cause health problems like the radio wave kind and are they more accurate.”

Gomez’s misleading and untruthful response: “I advised that the TEP meters are not radio wave and they are read through the electric lines and yes they are more accurate than the analog type.”

The unfortunate customer who called in was grossly misinformed by Gomez. TEP’s meters transmit microwaves every 30 seconds. That is a matter of public record.

At TEP’s website we find the following:

“Our AMR meters send out readings approximately every 30 seconds.” ( https://www.tep.com/news/updates/meters/ ) As well, anyone can view the video archives of the March 23, 2012 ACC “workshop” meeting and watch the TEP/Unisource representative tell everyone that TEP’s meters transmit every 30 seconds (at 4:54:08 here: http://azcc.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=3&clip_id=469).

As a sadly humorous side note, in the TEP/Unisource representative’s world, every 30 seconds is not “continuous.” If you had a dog barking next door every 30 seconds would that be continuous or not?

Additionally, not having done any comparative testing, neither Gomez not the ACC is qualified to make statements about the accuracy of TEP’s meters.

How can the ACC regulate something about which they know so little?

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