A bipartisan pair of lawmakers is pushing to more strictly regulate submetering, which is when third party middlemen purchase electricity or another utility at wholesale price and then resell it.
Reps. Tex Fischer (R-Boardman) and Sean Brennan (Parma) said Tuesday those who submeter offer the same services as traditional utilities, but without the regulatory strings attached, like abiding by potential consumer protections, offering payment assistance programs and honoring disconnection procedures.
“If you act like a utility and you look like a utility and you smell like a utility and you sound like a utility, you’re a utility, and you should therefore have the same (Public Utilities Commission of Ohio) oversight as any other utility in the state,” Brennan said.
Fischer and Brennan said Tuesday they would soon introduce a bill putting the practice through regulations similar to utilities.
Submetering is common at apartments or other multitenant housing, where apartment managers buy utility services, and then include the cost in the rent, often dividing based on individual usage among tenants.
Because of unregulated fees, watchdog agency the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel said the consumers on a submeter could be seeing significantly higher rates than the consumers being billed directly by their utilities.
“(The bill) restores the basic principle that no one should profit off reselling essential services without public accountability,” Counsel Maureen Willis said.
Fischer doesn’t want an outright end to submetering, he said.
“At my core, I’m a free market conservative, but what I do not believe in is businesses who are selling the same products to customers while playing by a different set of rules,” Fischer said.
Lobbyists with the Ohio Environmental Council and American Electric Power (AEP) of Ohio attended the news conference Tuesday where Fischer and Brennan rolled out the legislation.
As of Thursday, the bill had not yet been filed online or assigned a number. It’s not the first legislative session where lawmakers have introduced bills on submetering, though none have crossed the finish line.
