Court Opinion

ID: 9469870
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:51:03.979307+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:36.481199
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Chief Judge,
dissenting.
The majority assumes that the Commission, in its discretion, may and should deny Arkla the rate increase it will surely seek as a result of today’s decision. I respectfully disagree. Under the due process clause no public utility may be compelled to absorb its own costs. The most basic of such costs are expenditures for gas purchases, whether incurred routinely or, as here, as the final product of protracted litigation. Because Arkla’s ratepayers rather than Arkla received the benefit of its noncompliance with the “most favored nation” clause in the 1960s, it follows inevitably, in my view, that the ratepayers must bear the burden of Arkla’s belated compliance now.
This conclusion alters the analysis of this dispute for me. Rather than weighing the equities between Arkla and Hall, the balance must be struck between Arkla’s ratepayers and Hall. When the Commission made this inquiry, it decided that imposing the costs of compliance on today’s ratepayers would be inequitable. I cannot disagree. If these ratepayers are not the same as those who should have borne the cost twenty years ago, the inequity is obvious. Even if the identity of the ratepayers has remained constant, however, the effects of a retroactive increase on the long-completed business affairs of innocent ratepayers would be equally unjust. In either case, there is sufficient evidence to support the Commission’s conclusion. Therefore, without reaching the other grounds discussed by the majority, I respectfully dissent.