Toward Utility Rate Normalization v. Public Utilities Commission

I dissent.

The convoluted history of the Public Utilities Commission’s adoption of single message rate timing (SMRT) is a seemingly endless series of false starts, second thoughts, and reversals which does little credit to the administrative process.1 From this welter of indecision, however, there *546has now emerged at least one clear result: ratepayers who subscribe to the limited service of 60 local message units per month are to be the guinea pigs in the SMRT experiment. Although these ratepayers constitute but 11 percent of residential customers, the decision under review makes them the only…