Last Friday, we filed 106 pages of testimony and 980 pages of exhibits (give or take) opposing DTE Energy’s request for a $574 million (11% residential) rate increase. A week removed from that marathon, here are my reflections.
Evaluating EEP’s Role
We were drowning for weeks in our almost-but-never-finished testimony for DTE’s latest rate case. I would wake in the middle of the night re-calculating the number of census tracts to include in an affordability program, or wordsmithing a point about exactly how egregious DTE’s collection practices are. I felt my once richly oxygenated blood turning to a purple-black, depleted sludge.
What are we doing here? Scratching for what are likely to amount to crumbs for energy equity in a technocratic rate case?
I asked myself these questions again and again. My mind wandered to cocktails on a beach sheltered by coconut palms.
Lessons from Detroit’s Water Warriors
November 2015: In his opening statement as a defendant in the “Homrich 9” trial in Detroit, Pastor Bill Wylie Kellerman explained his motivation for taking the fight against Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s shutoffs to the courts:
“I have to say I and others have waited a long time to bring this case to you. It’s now going on a year and a half, but events are still vivid to us, because they were full of meaning. When we were arraigned last summer, we asked immediately for a jury trial. Back then, you may remember that every elected official in the City of Detroit had been replaced by one man – the Emergency Manager – who had put the city into bankruptcy. The elected school board had been replaced by emergency management. Even the Library commission was under assault. So we were mindful that a jury of Detroiters represented the last remaining form of democracy in the city. We were eager to put this case before you to vote on the matters of justice.”
At the time I lived in Detroit. We had rented space in Pastor Bill’s St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, where we ran the Youth Energy Squad program – training high school students to do basic home energy retrofits and teach people how to understand and lower their DTE bills. The People’s Water Board used the church as a hub for both organizing and bottled water distribution for the tens of thousands who had lost the flow from their own sinks.
The Homrich 9 may have been the sharp end of the spear fighting water shutoffs, but the movement was much much broader and deeper. The City was paying Homrich tens of millions of dollars to carry out tens of thousands of shutoffs, violating human rights principles established by the United Nations. The pressures of bankruptcy and historic bad debt swaps and obligation to send water at cheap wholesale prices far into the suburbs jacked up water bills for Detroiters. Those in power chose the one path that violated human rights, seized generational wealth through tax foreclosures, and upended the lives of tens of thousands of people.
By the time Pastor Bill and his comrade and longtime activist Marian Kramer stood trial, more damage had been done. Water shutoffs persisted. Unpaid water bills became liens tacked on to property taxes, and upwards of 20% of tax foreclosures in some neighborhoods were in part due to these debts for water. Pressed on the issue, the mayor advised with a straight face that no one was stopping anyone from going down to the Detroit River to fill a bucket.
It was an unthinkable stain, happening in America, happening to families I saw in tears. I can still remember being shooed out the back door when a Child Protective Services agent showed up while we were in the midst of a home energy visit. The family had had their water shutoff and the mom was terrified they would take her kids. I never learned how they fared.
Lessons from Covid and Other Crises
The solution, as Pastor Bill and others saw it, was organizing, protesting, chaining themselves to the gates of the shutoff executioners. Even after many years, they couldn’t rid the City of its shutoff-happy DNA. And then Covid hit.
3,000 households were without water from a prior shutoff at the start of the pandemic. DWSD was slow to get the taps flowing again. It took Mayor Duggan and Governor Whitmer 10 days to come up with a plan to restore water to them–at a flat $25 per month. There was no assurance an affordable bill would be offered afterward. Covid took the lives of too many Detroiters that spring, and certainly some of those people were ones who had yet to have their water turned back on.
The People’s Water Board foresaw the temporary nature of the Covid response. In March 2020, they wrote:
“It should not take an outbreak to realize that lack of water and sanitation poses a danger to the public health of those impacted by shutoffs, and everyone in our state….What happens after we get through this outbreak?….Are you going to go back out and shut these people off? Are you going to give them an incredible hike to their bill?”
This is the precarity of our times. Just as no one asked how people would survive without water during a global pandemic, no one asked how people without power would cope with persistent unhealthy and hazardous air quality that rolled into the Midwest on a current of wildfire smoke from Manitoba and Saskatchewan. If there is one thing that is predictable, it is that the time when we will most urgently need shutoff protections will be the scenario that was never on our radar.
Reacting to crises is better than not, but the tragedies we fail to prevent are exasperating. We could have saved the lives of 20 first graders and 6 teachers and staff in Sandy Hook Elementary had better gun laws been in place. And in Uvalde. Virginia Tech. Columbine. Orlando. Las Vegas. Charleston. Michigan State. A litany of unmentioned others. The levee failures that took 1,400+ lives 20 years ago during Hurricane Katrina. A vote not to invest a mere $1 million in emergency warning sirens that left 27 campers and counselors dead in a flood at Camp Mystic in Texas.
That so many public officials, for one reason or another, look past the inevitable is both infuriating and mystifying.
In my office in Detroit, after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2016, I printed and posted the names of the more than 5,000 people who had been killed by police in the last few years. There was barely enough room on the walls. I tried to read the names, ages, and communities where each was killed, slowly moving through 10 or 20 per day until months later when I became too sad and had to take down the whole list.
On the Record (Again) About Shutoffs by DTE
Energy shutoffs, too, are epidemic in Detroit and were the primary target of our testimony. DTE executed more than 1 million shutoffs from 2019 to 2024 – including a 5 month shutoff moratorium due to Covid – bringing the monthly average to over 15,000.
These numbers include all of DTE’s electric service territory, which spans most of the eastern half of Michigan’s lower peninsula. We don’t have the data to know how many of these occurred in Detroit.
We know that upwards of 30% of households who were shutoff endured multiple shutoffs in the same year. The majority of shutoffs are restored within 24 hours, but about 40,000 shutoffs during this period have extended more than a week. Another colleague, Yunus Kinkhabwala, calculated that DTE customers who are shut off experienced 52 million minutes without power in the last year. DTE is proposing to spend $265 million–about 4 times its total affordability program budget–to reduce storm-driven power outages by 25 million minutes.
After a shutoff, the cost to restore power is high. Families need to pay the past due balance, plus an additional month’s deposit. If they had previously had a payment fail, they need to pay in cash at a small number of kiosks or pay an extra fee to use a collection agent. Many report taking out predatory “payday” loans and falling behind on other bills to get the power back on. Some were swindled by DTE agents into signing up for a pretty useless surge protection or tree trimming program, believing they were required to do so in order to become eligible for an affordability program.
Reflecting on the Rate Case Decision-Making Process
Like Pastor Bill, we are testifying in a legal proceeding to end shutoffs. We didn’t earn our place on the stand by chaining ourselves to DTE’s 1 Energy Plaza, though. The rich red blood that energized Pastor Wylie Kellerman, and even Baba Baxter Jones who was cuffed in his wheelchair and thrown in the back of a police van–somehow these feel qualitatively different from the swimming pools of ink we have spilled this go around of our testimony. Shutoffs are unquestionably wrong and unnecessary. Whether energy or water, access to both is a basic human right, one being violated before our eyes.
We at EEP came in through the front door— the annual filing of a docket before the Michigan Public Service Commission that allows parties who are formally represented by legal counsel to file as intervenors and make their case in writing.
So this time, as we did last year, we documented all the harms of shutoffs. We conformed to the standards of evidence, provided economic estimates of the cost of shutoffs. Work time lost. Late fees, restoration costs, and other financial penalties. Burst pipes. Health impacts, shorter life spans, premature death. Last year the Commission’s final order expressed some sympathy for our arguments, but found that they were “not appropriate” to be considered during a rate case and should be taken up in some other forum.
And we didn’t just cover the problem, we offered solutions, just as water activists in Detroit have been doing for more than two decades now, dating back to the 2005 water affordability plan that was approved by Detroit City Council but never implemented. A plan to offer relief to the 33 hardest hit census tracts in MI and cut the amount they spend on energy from 13% to 6% of their incomes. I even put a dollar value on the potential of lives and life years and work hours lost from shutoffs (up to $281 million). A goddamned dollar value on human life. Trying to play this game by its brutalist rules. If just the writing of testimony is a heart-wrenching act, the trauma of the human data points is hard to comprehend.
We are trying to get our insights into the hands of the general public but it can feel like we’re screaming into the void. We spent weeks poring over thousands of pages of documents, crunching numbers, making sure our arguments were bulletproof. And yet–we know that DTE, with their infinite legal resources paid for through our energy bills, will file for another rate hike weeks after this case ends, like clockwork. We know that without any opposition, they are likely to simply get most of what they ask for. And we know that utilities just like DTE are running this playbook across the country.
Our testimony is now part of the written record and demands an official response from the regulators. The case will effectively be decided behind closed technocratic doors. Unlike Pastor Bill, we have no jury of our peers, no last vestige of democracy. Perhaps the Commissioner (or judge) most likely to have been sympathetic to our arguments has been replaced by Governor Whitmer with a new Commissioner who is expected to be more amenable to the utility’s demands for insatiable profits. The gavel seems unlikely to prevail.
In the end, Pastor Bill and Marian Kramer and the rest of the Homrich 9 “got their freedom papers” because the City of Detroit had unconstitutionally tried to run out the clock. After multiple trials were botched or suspended, a judge finally intervened three years after their action and said that their constitutional right to a speedy trial had been violated and all charges were dropped.
DTE and MPSC employ similar delay tactics, but we can’t win by merely outlasting them. The water activists presented a sound water affordability plan in 2005 and got what seemed like a victory with City Council approval. But they were shrewd enough to keep organizing until they saw proof. A lifeline plan is in place for at least the remainder of 2025.
Energy justice is going to require ongoing organizing and winning in the court of public opinion.
Realistically, our testimony is a stop gap. It will mean more when our narratives inspire more people to take to the streets and occupy the halls in Lansing.
Get involved:
Submit a public comment opposing DTE’s proposed rate increase
Soulardarity
Sugar Law Center for Economic Justice
Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition
Connect with EEP on LinkedIn and BlueSky
For related writings, see:
#WageLove, In memory of Charity Hicks, Detroit Water Activist