What happened to those $1,000 rebate checks Dominion Energy promised?

They weren’t in the mail for 727,000 ratepayers.

Dominion proposed giving average SC Electric & Gas ratepayers $1,000 each if lawmakers and regulators approved their takeover.

They spent millions touting the checks in ads that ran on TV and radio.

During merger negotiations, Dominion executives, consumer groups and regulators decided on lower power rates over 20 years by roughly $20 a month instead of the rebate.

They said it would be a bigger benefit over a much larger period of time than the one-time payment.

But those $1,000 checks were burned into the brains of many customers.

Now Dominion will do a new advertising blitz over the next several weeks, the Associated Press reported.

This one will tell SCE&G ratepayers not to count on the checks, but they will get a better deal.

“We understand some customers will be disappointed that refund checks are not included in the final approved plan,” Dominion spokeswoman Rhonda Maree O’Banion said in an email to the news service.

“We believe customers and South Carolina benefit from lower payments.”

Some lawmakers, especially those who represent poorer districts, feel Dominion pulled a bait-and-switch on their constituents.

They are pushing for support among African-Americans, then backtracking on promises. The ads touting the money urged calls to legislators in support of selling Lexington County-based SCANA and its SCE&G subsidiary.

“It seems that you were trying to advertise to the black community to impress upon us this $1,000 charity,” Democratic Sen. Margie Bright Mathews of Walterboro told Dominion officials at the Black Legislative Caucus.

“Your first order of business was to get a couple of black lobbyists and go to black colleges and advertise in black medium radio.”

SCE&G and SCANA wanted to sell after spending $5 billion on a failed nuclear project that may never generated a watt of electricity.

A carefully-worded state law written by SCANA allowed SCE&G and Santee Cooper to put that debt on ratepayers’ backs.