Light Brigade : Retirees Find Utility Overcharged Garden Grove, Caltrans for Electricity

GARDEN GROVE — Jack Schild begins each day with a ritual.

Arising at 6:30 a.m., he enters the garage of his suburban Orange County home, reads the numbers off the electricity meter hanging on its wall and carefully records them on a calendar to make sure he is being properly billed. “You can see how much I trust the Edison company,” quips the 63-year-old retiree.

Schild has reason to question the giant utility: For 18 months, he and a friend drove and walked the streets of their city to count each of its 7,716 street lights. What they found has astounded initially complacent city officials and set in motion events that could have statewide implications.

Over the past 32 years, the duo contends, the city and Caltrans--which oversees the Garden Grove Freeway--have been overcharged for electricity by more than $183,000.

The Southern California Edison Co., which operates the lights, has already refunded about $14,000 to the city and about $18,000 in credits to Caltrans. It has also stopped billing Garden Grove for electricity until the matter--including whether any future refunds will be paid--can be resolved through a complete remapping of the city’s street lights. And Caltrans officials met last week to begin looking at possible improvements in the monitoring of their electricity bills.

“We only want to pay what we owe,” said Jim Drago, a spokesman for Caltrans, which spends about $8 million a year on freeway lighting.

Said Schild: “I’d be surprised if we found the only example of this in the state.”

Neither Schild nor his partner--61-year-old Ray Littrell--are strangers to civic affairs. Littrell spent eight years as a Garden Grove city councilman, during which he earned a reputation as a hands-on politician good at saving the city money and, as one admirer put it, “getting to the bottom of things.” Schild is a retired Westinghouse Electric Corp. plant manager who served on the mayor’s special committee aimed at trimming municipal waste.

The two men, who live in the same neighborhood, have known each other for 15 years.

Their preoccupation with street lighting, Schild said, grew partly out of his experiences on the efficiency committee. One day he heard an offhand remark by an official from another city that started him thinking. If Garden Grove could own its own light poles instead of paying Edison for them, the official mused, a great deal of money could be saved.

From there, the discussion broadened into one of street-lighting economics in general. The upshot was the Garden Grove Citizens Lighting Committee, which Schild and Littrell formed in 1993 to look into the matter.

For the next year and a half, the two men, working out of Schild’s garage, spent most afternoons and evenings touring the city’s thousands of street lights by car and by foot. “It was something to do,” Schild recalled. “Some of the streets we drove three or four times--we were dedicated to the quest.”

Using Edison maps as guides, the two retirees counted the light fixtures, noted the power of their bulbs and checked on the rates at which they were being billed.

Several disturbing trends emerged, they said: Some of the lights Garden Grove was paying for were actually in the bordering cities of Westminster or Stanton. Others were being billed at incorrect rates or, in some cases, double-billed at both flat and metered rates. And along the Garden Grove Freeway, the men said, some lights were being paid for by both Caltrans and Garden Grove while others were being billed to Caltrans at inflated rates.

Garden Grove officials, however, were not instant fans of the findings.

“At first, city staff and everybody else took a dim view of it,” Mayor Bruce Broadwater recalled. “They had to sell us on what they were doing.”

But after conducting some surveys of its own, the city later “jumped on the bandwagon,” Broadwater said, eventually submitting a claim to Edison for $83,498.59 in overcharges dating to 1963.

Caltrans officials--who Schild and Littrell believe have been overcharged about $100,000 since 1987--were slower to react. They accept some responsibility for not seeking the $18,000 that has since been refunded, Drago said.

“We were being billed for a service we didn’t want,” he said, “but the fact is that we didn’t notify [Edison] to turn it off.”

As for the rest of the money, he said, the agency is looking into it.

An Edison spokesman said the company is in the process of determining the accuracy of the two men’s claims. Part of the problem, he said, is the lack of communication over the years between the utility and some of its customers.

“One of the things people don’t understand is that this is a dynamic business, it changes daily,” said Rod Davis, an Edison manager in charge of meters and street lights. The company depends on its customers, especially cities and other public agencies, to report changes in the level of service such as the addition, removal or relocation of lights.

When such things are not reported, Davis said, they might not be discovered for “a long time,” resulting in some services being billed at no longer appropriate rates.

Davis said the company hopes to overcome that problem with a new computerized mapping system--coupled with aggressive field inspections--under development since 1991. In Garden Grove, he said, the remapping has already been completed and is being reviewed by city officials.

“Garden Grove was not one of our cleanest cities,” Davis admitted, adding that Edison stopped billing the city for electricity in May and will not resume billing until all the financial issues have been resolved.

Although a Public Utilities Commission rule exonerates utility companies from liability for overcharges more than 3 years old, he said, Edison would like to come to a fair resolution of the matter. “They showed me enough evidence to let me know that we needed to get in there and take a look,” he said.

Meanwhile, the two regular members of the Garden Grove Citizens Lighting Committee continue their work from Schild’s garage.

“What kept us going was that we smelled a rat,” Schild explained recently from a folding chair on his driveway. “It just took us all this time and effort to get the little sucker out of its hole.”