The court settlement promised to SC Electric & Gas ratepayers amounts to pennies on the dollar. That’s insulting.

The culprits in this fiasco are:

• The Public Service Commission – the state regulators whose duty was to protect ratepayers in utility requests.

• Deceitful SC Electric & Gas executives who conned the regulators and now live in luxury with millions of our dollars taken with them into retirement.

• State lawmakers who a dozen years ago were conned by SCE&G lobbyists and executives into passing a state law that allowed the utility to charge all of us for their mismanagement of a nuclear reactor project that probably will never produce a single kilowatt of electricity.

They gulled lawmakers into believing this was best for the ratepayers. It wasn’t. It actually cost 727,000 ratepayers $2 billion in higher rates over 9 years.

Current lawmakers such as Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey now face a severe test in finding a solution to fixing or ending a regulated monopoly system that rewards utility executives and their shareholders at the expense of ratepaying businesses and home owners.

It doesn’t make it any easier for him and others in our delegation who were not even in office when legislators were tricked into passing that law.

Sen. Massey told us the settlement checks are ridiculous.

“Basically, the ratepayers get to divide the money SCANA had set aside for executive bonuses,” he said. “There should be another small amount coming at some point when Dominion sells some SCANA property. That won’t be nearly enough to compensate for what we’ve already paid or what we’ll pay in increased rates when Dominion files for a rate increase next year.”

Dominion executives are used to getting their way with lawmakers and regulators in states where they do business.

Lawmakers may stand up to them but not our regulators.

They have demonstrated that they will give utility executives just about anything they want.

This system must be scrapped.

– Jerry Bellune