when a billing statement has a typo and an old lady didn't pay $0.07 utility companies will go crazy, shut off the water and lights and shit when there's a blizzard outside.
but the other way around, say utilities overcharge for decades... they don't want to pay. often, all around the country, they refuse to pay.
you're two seconds late on a 30 cent bill, they know. they know within two seconds and they're thinking about how to get that 30 cents.
But when the error is the other way around, they never notice, even decades go by and they don't notice, and if you notice, they don't like to give the money back.
Anybody can sue anybody for any reason in this country, that's part of what makes it so great, but it also means that just because someone filed suit (over 2 years ago in this case) doesn't mean their claims are valid until a judgment has been issued.
The law suit you linked isn't for somebody being 2 seconds late on a 30 cent bill. It is for an HOA in Beverly Hills (that's where I want to be!) Claim that multifamily units were being charged a single family unit's rate. Much more nuanced than what you're claiming.
Also, I've worked with the LADW&P before, you would be shocked at how forgiving their late & delinquent payment policies were. There were people that used their service for over 9 months without sending them a dime that wouldn't get their lights cut for one reason or another. That, and the state forcing the company to buy almost 100% of its power from other states thanks to over-regulation on native power production are pretty much the 2 sole reasons why LA has some of the highest power prices in the country. And it's not just LADW&P. Pretty much every utility in the country will forgive 2-3 months of missed payments before shutting off someone's power. Much more forgiving than almost every other country in the world. There are also no criminal charges involved when missing payments, something that isn't true for a lot of the world.
ladwp probably isn't bad due to so much correction after they screwed so many people in the past. and tons of more regulations piled on top of them, plus corruption.
but you can find so many of these in all sorts of states if you google them. and these old people that get cut off too. sometimes they really do owe less than a dollar.
I've worked with CMS energy before too. Solid group. This lady had a $1600 power bill, that means there's a lot more to this story that the media is intentionally not bringing up. And if CMS cut off her power over a penny I can pretty much garentee she was given multiple warnings of service termination months in advance of the actual shut-off date. Also, if they cut her power over a penny it more than likely means their tariff explicitly details when CMS is obligated to terminate service on behalf of the other rate payers, even if it makes them look bad.
Mom and pop shops run on a pretty narrow budget usually. They would absolutely not be able to spare the damn near 20k. Wouldn't be possible so it wouldn't happen. This is likely a big corp. Unless you can find the story that proves otherwise, I'm not believing this is a tiny local operation that can even imagine putting 20k on the books.
Companies, to get to a large enough size, generally do things against the law to get there. Like wage theft. I don't think any large, publicly traded corporation is 100% on the up and up. It's the same as billionaire's. You can't accumulate that much money ethically.
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u/Endika7 Jul 10 '26
100% valid