Advisory Boards Created by Legislation Often Left Unfilled

‘Dead on the Vine’ 

By Colleen Cronin / ecoRI News staff

This reporting was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

State's message seems to be they don't want advice

Ten years ago, when Rhode Islanders had concerns about the high cost of an electricity bill or struggled to get the heat back on, they could go before the Ratepayers Advisory Board, an assembly of appointed volunteers, to air their grievances, and in many cases move the needle on their problems.

The Pawtucket-based George Wiley Center and other groups would often champion those issues, too, recalled Camilo Viveiros, executive director of the center, and bring them before the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), which oversees rate changes and other policies.

“We wouldn’t always get a response,” Viveiros said. “The Ratepayers Advisory Board would nudge the PUC to respond.”

He said the board was instrumental in getting modified payment plans in place that made it easier for customers to reinstate service, instead of remaining without heat or electricity because they couldn’t afford it.

“It is important to have something that has a broad oversight of utility policies,” Viveiros said.

Although Viveiros and others saw it as a champion for customers, it’s been seven years since the Ratepayers Advisory Board met. It’s just one of the bodies that oversees environmental or related policy that has become defunct, despite laws mandating they meet, file reports, and advise state officials.

Today, a series of community groups that aren’t specifically designated as ratepayer advocates try to pick up the slack, taking issues to the PUC directly, according to Viveiros, but it’s not the same or as effective as an independent body.

“This is an important [board] that really can be sort of a watchdog for how issues impact utility consumers,” he said.

Common Cause Rhode Island executive director John Marion told ecoRI News that widespread vacancies are due to a lack of responsibility on the part of government officials, and while the law created these bodies, it doesn’t offer clear solutions for resurrecting them when they’ve gone into hibernation.

A series of unfortunate events

The Ratepayers Advisory Board was created by a 2011 law supported by the George Wiley Center. (Sandra Morra, a longtime advocate and member of the center, was the board’s first chair, Viveiros said.)

The responsibilities of the board included advising the PUC on issues that concerned residential ratepayers, such rate affordability, shut-off policies, consumer education, and pending legislation.

According to the law, the Ratepayers Advisory Board should be composed of 11 members, appointed by the governor, speaker of the House, and Senate president. They must represent different groups, including people who are elderly and/or have disabilities, small-businesses owners, the chamber of commerce, residents of affordable housing, and low-income individuals.

The board is supposed to meet quarterly; members are not allowed to be compensated for their roles; and the panel is required to file a report to the General Assembly and governor with “recommendations on current or proposed state programs, policies, regulations, and laws,” the statute reads.

But there hasn’t been a new member appointed since Lincoln Chafee was governor, according to the Secretary of State’s website.

“The last terms of the membership elapsed in 2017,” Thomas Kogut, chief of information and public affairs specialist at the state Division of Public Utilities and Carriers (DPUC), confirmed.

According to Viveiros, although the ratepayer board was successful in advocating for utility consumers, a series of health issues and deaths of board members led to it becoming inactive.

“There was one chair who got sick and actually passed away, then another chair retired, and then another chair of the committee had a lot of health ailments,” he said. “So, little by little, participation was difficult to coordinate.”

Then, a DPUC staff member who acted as a secretary for the board also got sick and died, which Viveiros said was the final straw.

“We were trying to be patient,” Viveiros said. “We definitely have members that want to participate. It’s time to bring it back.”

A return of the Ratepayers Advisory Board?

Viveiros isn’t the only one who would like to see the board make a comeback.

“I can tell you that as recently as last year [DPUC Administrator Linda George] and I received a couple of inquiries about appointments and/or re-constituting the board,” Kogut wrote in an email to ecoRI News. “We forwarded that information to the governor’s office.”

Although DPUC is required by law to administer the board by offering it a meeting place and coordinating meetings, it doesn’t have appointment power, Kogut noted. Still, former administrators have “made efforts to rejuvenate the board (by informally seeking interested members),” he wrote.

Sue AnderBois, a Providence City Council member and climate and government relations director for The Nature Conservancy in Rhode Island, was among those who reached out to DPUC with interest in seeing the board revived.

Working on the Future of Gas docket, AnderBois had been digging into energy-efficiency laws already on the books and started wondering why there wasn’t an official ratepayer advocate for Rhode Island, like there are in other states.

When she came across the Ratepayers Advisory Board in the statues, she reached out to DPUC to figure out if it still existed.

“I was just like, ‘Where is this, it sounds like a great idea … oh, someone already thought of it!’” she said.

AnderBois noted having a body to advocate for ratepayers and low-income residents, in particular, is crucially needed right now, as the state works on transitioning to cleaner forms of energy and increasing energy efficiency.

“In a lot of our energy dockets, it could be an important voice,” AnderBois said.

During the last legislative session, Rep. Michael Chippendale, the Republican House minority leader, sponsored legislation to try to revive the board, with some modifications.

His bill (H7429), which was held for further study, would have increased the frequency of the board’s meetings from quarterly to monthly and installed the commissioner of the state Office of Energy Resources as the board’s chair.

“We wanted this to kick-start [the board] again,” he said.

Chippendale, who represents Coventry, Foster, and Glocester, said he is often on the receiving end of angry phone calls from constituents, upset that their utility bills are too expensive.

“They feel they don’t have any means of expressing their frustrations,” which Chippendale said is reasonable following rate hikes that could be “crippling to someone living on a fixed income.”

Chippendale said that from his perspective, the PUC only has so much room within the law to avoid rate hikes, as legislation often shapes where energy has to come from and thus how much it costs.

As the Act on Climate law pushes the state to electrify, he said he believes it’s important for ratepayers to have a chance to advocate for and advise on those changes, so that the cost burden of that shift doesn’t fall on them.

Chippendale was in office when the board started and said it “allows people to have a voice heard.”

“I see no reason why this shouldn’t be passed into law … and/or it shouldn’t be reactivated,” he said, adding that he plans on submitting the bill again in the coming legislative session.

‘Dead on the vine’

The Ratepayers Advisory Board is just one of several environment-related boards that no longer meets, according to an ecoRI News review of Rhode Island general laws.

Some of the inactive boards are antiquated; the Bee Keeping Advisory Board, the commission on railroad crossings, and the Milk Commission are all defunct.

Others have been rolled into other government bodies or meet less regularly. That’s the case for several boards that are overseen by the Department of Environmental Management, according to agency spokesperson Evan LaCross.

For example, the functions that were performed by the Mosquito Abatement Board fall under the Mosquito Borne Disease Advisory Group now, which LaCross said convenes weekly during mosquito season.

A commission called the Joint Resolution Creating a Special Joint Legislative Commission to Study and Provide Recommendations to Protect Our Environment and Natural Resources from Plastic Bottle Waste, he noted, has a similar mission to the Plastic Recycling and Litter Commission, which was supposed to be permanent but hasn’t met in years.

The Air Pollution Operating Advisory Commission is mandated by law to review permits for stationary sources of air pollution, but hasn’t had new members since the 1990s. LaCross said DEM’s Office of Air Resources performs all the requirements of that statute.

For Common Cause’s Marion, the problem of totally or partially vacant boards is a common one that goes beyond environmental policy and causes — he’s seen a statute that requires he sit on a board, as Common Cause’s executive director, that he’s never heard of.

But, he said, the ramifications of those boards going defunct varies in seriousness.

“There are all these vestigial boards that exist in Rhode Island, some of which have outlasted their useful life,” Marion said. “There are boards that were created because of a public demand, and they’ve been left to die on the vine because the people who appoint them haven’t fulfilled their responsibility.”

It is usually the responsibility of department heads, the governor, the House speaker, the Senate president, or a combination of officials to appoint members to these bodies, and often the Senate has to confirm them, which it can only do when it’s in session. That means some appointments can only happen during half of the year, because Rhode Island has a part-time Legislature.

“There’s no stick,” said Marion, meaning there’s no penalty for not appointing those positions. “Theoretically, the public officials can be turned out of office for not doing their job,” but in reality, “elected officials face little penalty at the ballot box” for leaving boards vacant.

In some other states, if the official designated to appoint a board member doesn’t do so within a certain time period, the responsibility will pass onto another official, or members of a board will be kicked off when their term expires, something that doesn’t happen for most Rhode Island bodies. But, Marion said, that can lead officials to purposely let terms expire to kill these bodies, something he said he’s seen happen at the federal level.

While some boards are completely vacant, others have gone years without full membership.

Up until recently, the state Ethics Commission didn’t have a full board. The powerful Coastal Resources Management Council, which oversees marine and shore permitting, is currently missing two members, and the Rhode Island Transit Authority’s board is down a member.

“That’s a symptom of the same problem,” Marion said.

In his experience, the most effective way to fill these vacancies is when the organizations that were interested in getting these oversight bodies started in the first place demand their resuscitation.

When asked if Gov. Dan McKee was considering reviving the Ratepayers Advisory Board, as well as the Plastic Recycling and Litter Commission and the Operating Permits Advisory Commission for Air Quality, spokesperson Olivia DaRocha wrote in a statement, “The governor’s office is in the process of evaluating the scope and requirements of each of these boards and commissions to determine next steps.”

(The governor, House speaker, and Senate president are all responsible for appointing members to the Ratepayers Advisory Board, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation.)

“If there is a desire at DPUC to reconstitute [the Ratepayers Advisory] board, we will look into making appointments,” the spokespeople for House Speaker Joseph Shekarchi and Senate President Dominick Ruggerio said in a joint statement.

“The session doesn’t start again until January,” Viveiros said. “It’s a good New Year’s resolution, maybe, to get it back and running.”