Open letter to Piers McDonald, chair Yukon Energy Corporation board of directors:
The Utilities Consumers’ Group wrote to you on May 9, 2013 and again on August 28 with our concerns for the careless overspending by the Yukon Energy Corporation. To this date we have not even received a letter of acknowledgement for receipt of our communication.
Our organization is not the only one representing public concerns. On August 26 an interested citizen wrote: “The YEC needs to be managed transparently, ethically and efficiently.” Not responding to such critical matters gives an appearance of arrogance and being above the general public.
As chair of this publicly-owned utility, your mandate to “oversee the conduct of business and supervise the president and chief executive officer.” So we will try again, this time through public media!
For the latest rate application by Yukon Energy, they applied for $825,377 in regulatory costs to be recovered from ratepayers. The Yukon Utilities Board awarded only $556,026, stating the other costs were “not reasonable.”
UCG is apprehensive about this outcome as these “unreasonable” expenses have already been spent and they will likely show up in the creative accounting of expenses to be paid for by the ratepayer. This is what we wrote to you about in May and again in August.
If it was just a few hundred or even a couple of thousand dollars we could let this pass, but it is over a quarter of a million. And this is not the first time; the board found YEC regulatory spending unreasonable in 2011 of some $157,390 and $224,234 in 2009.
These transactions were under the watch of you and the other board of directors who are responsible for the conduct of this corporation.
If such conspicuous amounts of overspending occurs in this one area, what about the multi-millions of dollars Yukon Energy has spent on all the studies and plans for alternative energy, for which not one concept has nor will likely ever come to fruition. These need to be audited! Now we have another $34.5-million LNG pie in the sky!
It appears that there is a culture of entitlement in your ranks and we request you and your other officers either do your job or step aside and let someone who will. In the meantime, the public needs to be guaranteed that you will make certain that this unreasonable spending will cease immediately and what has already been unreasonably spent will be paid for by the shareholder of the corporation, not the ratepayer.
Roger Rondeau
Utilities Consumers’ Group