Utah Power & Light Co. v. Idaho Public Utilities Commission

685 P.2d 276, 107 Idaho 47, 1984 Ida. LEXIS 498
CourtIdaho Supreme Court
DecidedJune 20, 1984
Docket14433
StatusPublished
Cited by9 cases

This text of 685 P.2d 276 (Utah Power & Light Co. v. Idaho Public Utilities Commission) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Idaho Supreme Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Utah Power & Light Co. v. Idaho Public Utilities Commission, 685 P.2d 276, 107 Idaho 47, 1984 Ida. LEXIS 498 (Idaho 1984).

Opinions

BISTLINE, Justice.

The basic issue presented today is whether the Idaho Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has the authority to grant a public utility a surcharge to recover past losses caused by an invalid PUC order set aside by this Court on appeal.

On December 29, 1976, Utah Power & Light Company (UP & L) applied to the PUC to increase its rates and charges for its customers in the State of Idaho by $12,536,000. UP & L requested that the proposed rates and charges become effective on January 31, 1977. The proposed rates were suspended by the PUC pursuant to I.C. § 61-622.1

On September 29, 1977, pursuant to Order No. 13448, the PUC authorized UP & L to increase its rates and charges by $3,371,-408 annually instead of by the $12,536,000 requested by UP & L. UP & L timely petitioned for rehearing from this order. On November 11, 1977, the PUC issued Order No. 13550 which denied in part and [49]*49granted in part UP & L’s petition for rehearing. UP & L timely appealed to this Court from Order No. 13550 denying in part its petition for rehearing.

In the meantime, a rehearing was held. On March 16, 1978, the PUC determined that it had erred in one aspect of its calculation of UP & L’s revenue requirement and that Order No. 13448 of September 29, 1977, should have granted an increase of $3,647,900 to UP & L. The PUC then issued Order No. 13739 which superseded Order No. 13448 and authorized UP & L to file higher tariffs based upon its correction of the earlier order.

UP & L’s appeal from Order No. 13448 came at issue in December, 1978. This Court issued an opinion in the appeal, Utah Power & Light Company v. Idaho Public Utilities Commission, 102 Idaho 282, 629 P.2d 678 (1981) {UP & LI), in May of 1981. In UP & L I, the Court set aside PUC Order No. 13448 because it determined that the PUC erred by failing to make adjustments to the 1976 test year data for certain “known and measurable changes,” which error resulted in the establishment of an artificially low rate base. Id. at 284, 629 P.2d at 680.

On July 27, 1981, UP & L filed a petition for hearing with the PUC requesting it to modify Order No. 13448 set aside by this Court in UP & LI and to recover UP & L’s shortfall of operating revenue resulting from that order. By testimony and exhibits submitted, UP & L quantified the amount of additional revenue which it should have recovered during Order No. 13448’s period of effectiveness from September 29, 1977, to March 21, 1978, as $6,068,000. It requested that it be allowed to recover this deficiency by a surcharge to its Idaho customers imposed over a 12-month period.

Upon receiving UP & L’s petition, the PUC raised the question of its authority to impose a surcharge of the kind requested by UP & L and set oral argument in the matter. After argument, the PUC issued an informal oral ruling from the bench and declined to hold any further hearings on UP & L’s petition.

The PUC summarized the Public Utility Law thus in denying UP & L’s request for a surcharge:

“[W]e construe the Public Utility Law as follows: When any party, be it utility, ratepayer or the State of Idaho, appeals a rafe setting Order of the Idaho Public Utilities Commission to the Supreme Court of Idaho, but does not stay the effectiveness of the Order by posting bond under the terms of the Public Utility Law, then the rates and charges set forth by that Order are final in all respects as service is provided and consumed so long as the Order continues in effect. If the Order is later set aside by the Supreme Court of Idaho, no rates and charges previously collected may be adjusted as a result; similarly, no rates and charges later established by the Commission may be adjusted from what they otherwise would have been to take into account what the appealed Order would have been before it was set aside had it, during the time it was in effect, conformed to or been altered or amended to meet the objections of the opinion of the Supreme Court of Idaho. The statutes governing rehearing, appeal and stay of our orders, and the general prohibitions against setting rates based upon previous periods of unreasonably high or unreasonably low rates, admit no other construction. We are a regulatory Commission, not a court of law, and have no authority to award damages except as given to us by statute.” (Footnote omitted.)

We agree with the PUC’s interpretation of the Public Utilities Law and therefore affirm its decision in this case.

I.

UP & L contends that the stay and bond procedures provided by the Public Utilities [50]*50Laws, I.C. §§ 61-633 through 61-638,2 do not provide the exclusive means for obtaining monetary relief from PUC orders denying public utilities’ requested rate increases. UP & L argues that these procedures are not always available to a petitioning party and so should not be construed as providing the exclusive means for obtaining monetary relief.

A. EXCLUSIVE REMEDY

UP & L contends that the granting of a stay by either the district court or the Supreme Court pursuant to I.C. §§ 61-633 and -636 is discretionary with the courts. UP & L argues that under the PUC’s interpretation of the stay and bond provisions an appeal can only be an effective remedy if the reviewing court chooses to exercise its discretion in granting a stay. UP & L argues that to make the effectiveness of an appeal hinge upon the granting of a discretionary stay conflicts with its basic due process rights and with I.C. § 61-627 which grants any aggrieved party a direct right of appeal to the Supreme Court.

In Joy v. Winstead, 70 Idaho 232, 238, 215 P.2d 291, 293 (1950), this Court, in addressing the question of a district court’s jurisdiction to stay PUC orders, first observed “that due process requires that courts stay an order of a commission, i.e., regulatory body, if enforcement thereof may result in confiscation and irreparable loss, until the final adjudication, through appropriate channels, of the correctness of the order.” The Court followed with the declaration that “pendente lite, the Company must be protected against confiscation, if irreparable, and to insure and accomplish [51]*51this Courts may and must, if the Commission does not, stay enforcement of a confiscatory rate, correspondingly protecting the consumer.” 70 Idaho at 238, 215 P.2d 291. Our reading of this passage, with the following correction of the obvious clerical error in capitalization and another in punctuation, is that “to insure and accomplish a company’s protection against confiscation, courts may, and must if the Commission does not, enter appropriate stay orders.”

Four years later this Court in Mountain States Tel. & Tel. Co. v. Jones, 75 Idaho 78, 267 P.2d 634 (1954), in commenting on Joy v. Winstead, observed that it had not therein in any way outlined the procedure or what was necessary to be shown in order to justify a stay order.

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Utah Power & Light Co. v. Idaho Public Utilities Commission
685 P.2d 276 (Idaho Supreme Court, 1984)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
685 P.2d 276, 107 Idaho 47, 1984 Ida. LEXIS 498, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/utah-power-light-co-v-idaho-public-utilities-commission-idaho-1984.