The Florida Public Service Commission allows utilities to keep confidential some information in their filings that they deem too sensitive for competitive reasons.
But critics argue that the PSC allows utilities to abuse this privilege to shield information that is not truly competitive, and sometimes is simply embarrassing. They contend this unfairly prevents the public from having information about cases that directly affect them.
While PSC staff, commissioners and intervening parties are permitted to view the confidential information, they are prohibited from making the information public.
"If people knew what was going on, the public would be outraged," says John McWhirter, an attorney for the Florida Industrial Power Users Group in Tampa.
Tampa Electric Co. recently claimed as confidential some internal calculations about the estimated savings it would reap from the early shutdown of coal-fired generating units at its Bayside power station and what it would mean for customer bills.
And Progress Energy Florida of St. Petersburg has kept under wraps specifics of a cost formula it uses to pay an affiliate for coal transport.
In the dispute over proposed rate increases for local phone companies, the companies must offset those increases with cuts in the access fees they charge long-distance carriers for instate calls. In their filings with the PSC about how much these cuts will lower their long-distance rates, AT&T, MCI, Sprint and Verizon included no specific rate information and blacked out numbers in the publicly released versions that specify the savings to be passed on to residential and business customers.
"It goes right to the nub of the case," deputy public counsel Charlie Beck said. "It's not right that such important information be held confidential so that the public doesn't know what's going on."
Beck argues that even if information provided to the PSC is truly of a competitive nature, utilities should provide the information in a more general form so consumers can gauge what is at stake.
"This is the public's business," Beck said. "These are government agencies doing the public's business."
