OKLAHOMA CITY – Several customers whose natural- gas service is provided by Navitas and its subsidiaries expressed to state regulators their displeasure with the utility company’s rate increase.
A couple of business owners, for example, related their concerns.
Navitas’ natural gas rates “are already substantially higher than other providers, and raising them any higher will alter the way our company does business,” Jordan Gunter of Gunter Peanut Co. in Binger wrote in an email to the Corporation Commission.
Dean Smith of SS Farms Operating in Hydro said he appreciates “the service” and employees of Fort Cobb Fuel Authority, a utility company that Navitas bought in 2007.
Navitas “has made a lot of improvements” to its gas distribution system, added Dale Boerwinkle, who works with Smith.
“We know that … acquiring natural gas from a highly erratic deregulated market would be extremely challenging and potentially devastating to a utility business, as revealed in February 2021” during Winter Storm Uri, Smith said. In addition, “We know that delivering the fuel to homes and businesses in sparsely populated areas is more expensive than in towns and cities.”
Nonetheless, he asked the Corporation Commission to be “extra diligent in determining the validity” of FCFA’s rate increase application.
“Planning to relocate from Hinton to the country, we evaluated our residential bills on the house in town,” Smith related. Comparing usage volumes from his 2023 bills, he calculated FCFA’s current residential rates to what he paid Hinton’s gas provider (Summit) last year.
FCFA’s average utility bill was 57.5% higher – and that was using existing rates, before the price hike approved May 14.
Propane “looks attractive” as an alternative fuel, Boerwinkle told Southwest Ledger.
SS Farms “raises and pre-processes (drying, cleaning and grinding)” hot peppers “in preparation for an extractor in the northern U.S.,” Smith told the Corporation Commission. The fuel bill for drying is “a large component in the cost of finishing the production,” and SS Farms “used 50 times as much natural gas as our house did,” he wrote.
The increase in the base rate “comes at a time when prices for specialty crops have stalled, prices for commodity crops have bottomed, and certain input costs (especially repairs and parts) have doubled,” Smith related.
Mysterious ‘tariff tax’ cost $120 in January After receiving a notice from Navitas that they applied for a rate hike, Sharon Sharp of Guthrie declared that the company’s rates are “absolutely outrageous already, along with their addons which include a mysterious ‘Tariff Tax’ ripoff!” The company uses inflation “as an excuse, but HELLO!!, inflation is killing all of us.”
Sharp said she received an increase in her Social Security benefit “and what is that going to get me with absolutely everything going up? I have two part-time jobs in order to be able to keep my property and feed my animals.”
She said she has lived on her property for 12 years and Southern Star previously was their natural-gas provider. “After Navitas took over, my bills (and those of every other person I have talked with in my neighborhood) shot up 2-3 times more than we had ever paid for natural gas before – and that includes years of ice storms and below- freezing temperatures.”
Her gas bill in January “was more than 3 times what I used to pay… I thought I had a gas leak somewhere, but I did not. The ‘Tariff Tax’ alone was $120.”
Sharp said she keeps her thermostat at 65 degrees, and wears “a lot of clothes” and uses a blanket “when sitting on my couch.”
Customers turn to electricity, wood “A lot of the people around here have switched to electric heat because they cannot afford the gas prices,” said Jerry Gould of Ramona, 14 miles south of Bartlesville. “I can heat with electric portable heaters cheaper than using my furnace.”
Jamie Ready of Cleveland said he also opposed the rate increase “while my household is struggling to keep up with the cost of everything increasing (insurance, taxes, groceries, fuel) – except wages.” Navitas “would lose more money when I am forced to stop using natural gas and use my fireplace full-time.”
David and Cynthia Phillips of Bartlesville had a similar response. “We burn wood just to try and keep expenses to a minimum, but it doesn’t seem to be working,” they wrote.
Fix leaky gas lines Jamie Ready said Navitas doesn’t need to increase its rates. Instead, “They need to fix their outdated, dangerous leaky lines and then they will profit from not losing natural gas into the air. We have had many leaks in my neighborhood and they never fix it correctly. It always smells so bad.”
The utility’s plastic distribution lines “are so close to the surface that our mower has struck them. We have called the company several times over several years and it still leaks. They can never seem to locate leaks, either so they leave and hope we will forget about it.”
During installation of a water line to Ready’s property, a gas line was struck “which the gas company didn’t even know was there,” he claimed. The company “needs to tighten their belt and take care of their leaky infrastructure…” Ron and Cheryl Gallegos of Guthrie had a similar complaint.
One issue where “it is plainly evident that the costs attributable to domestic tap and non-domestic tap users are nothing alike, much less comparable, are the costs FCFA is permitted to pass on to its customer s due to lost, used a nd unaccounted for gas.” FCFA’s “lost gas” arises from its plant infrastructure operations and pipeline distribution network, the couple told the Corporation Commission.
None of that infrastructure delivers natural gas to domestic tap customers, they noted. “The gas we receive flows directly from the Southern Star pipeline to the meter and to our house.” There is “no loss in delivering gas to domestic tap customers,” they maintained, “and it is not ‘equitable’ to charge us for it.”
Customers contend FCFA rates too high “I compared my gas bill with my son who lives in Skiatook” and is served by Oklahoma Natural Gas Co., Gould wrote. “My bill is always three times the price” for the commensurate volume of cubic feet of natural gas.
In the 41 years they’ve lived in their Ba rtlesville home, the Phillipses “have had many gas companies.” They said they were told that Fort Cobb Fuel Authority “did not want any residential customers on their gas lines, they wanted only companies.”
The couple wrote, “We didn’t ask for this company but we always pay our bills.” However, “many times” their gas bill “has been more than we could afford to pay” – $515.83 on one occasion, $329.38 on another, and one bill in 2022 was $223 – and they turned to “outside sources” for financial assistance. “With the prior company our bill never got over $60.”
Kristie Detwiler of Mulhall compared her family’s bills from FCFA with what Oklahoma Natural Gas charges for an identical volume of natural gas.
Her December bill from FCFA was $362.27, compared to $147.65 that ONG would charge for the same amount of gas: 189 cubic feet, she wrote. The FCFA bill for January was $786.37 for 443 cubic feet of gas; ONG charged $288.02 for the same quantity of gas, she told the commission.