Rosapepe Urges Major Fines for Pepco "Surge Reserve"

Sen. Jim Rosapepe (D-Dist. 21) is urging the Maryland Public Service Commission to impose fines against power companies, with the money going to help customers get power back quicker after storms.

In a letter to the PSC co-signed by Sen. Brian Frosh (D-District 16), Rosapepe said a fine of $100 million against PEPCO and Baltimore Gas & Electric could fund a "Surge Reserve" to pay workers to help end long power outages.

From the letter:

"Despite the Legislature's clear policy direction and creation of additional tools to enforce compliance, the power companies failed over the past week to meet their responsibilities to more than 1 million Marylanders. Thousands of Marylanders lost power for 6 days. Altogether, more than 3 million days of power service were lost. Obviously this is intolerable if Maryland is to protect its economy."

Rosapepe and Frosh are urging Maryland residents to sign their name to the letter at Change.org.

The letter comes after hundreds of thousands of BGE customers lost power due to the . In some cases, customers were

Rosapepe and Frosh acknowledge in their letter that "some of the down time was inevitable," but said the PSC should still use its authority to impose fines of up to $25,000 per day, per customer. (That power to fine at that level was passed into law by the state legislature in 2011.)

On Sept. 13 and 14, the Maryland Public Service Commission will hold legislative-style hearings on the storm outages. Between now and then, it plans to hold eight evening hearings to receive public comment.