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economic justice
The Storm Bill Is Coming; Ratepayers Are Paying It Twice
Rising storm damage, opaque cost recovery, and inaccessible proceedings are making utility rate cases one of the defining economic justice battlegrounds of our time.
Mar 29, 2026
Across the US, electric utility customers are being asked to pay for the same storms twice. First, they pay the costs of the damage through rate increases and special adjustors that quietly appear on monthly bills. Then they pay again as infrastructure investment charges that utilities say will prevent the next storm from costing so much. The accounting for what happened with the money is rarely provided. When called to account, they are pointed to bureaucratic filing systems that require expert navigation to decode.
This is not a bug in the utility regulatory system. For utilities, it is a feature.
The evidence is hiding in plain sight. It’s available to everyone inside the regulatory dockets that govern what every household pays for electricity, but these documents are practically inaccessible. And inside them, a pattern is repeating across states, as utilities are collecting ratepayer money to manage storm risk, spending it in bad years, and then updating the recovery mechanism. Simultaneously, they request rate increases to fund infrastructure hardening they say will protect against future storms. The cycle repeats. The bills keep rising. The accounting stays buried.
What the Dockets Actually Show
In Vermont, Green Mountain Power (GMP) collected $6 million annually from customers beginning in fiscal year 2023 as a dedicated Major Storm Restoration Fund. It was established as a separate line item on customer bills to pre-fund major storm restoration costs. The mechanism made sense. Collect in the good years, draw down in the bad ones, smooth the bill impact of catastrophic weather events.
Politicians who want to talk about energy affordability need to understand regulatory proceedings. Saying utility bills are too high is easy. Doing something about it requires visible, deeper engagement.
Then came 2023, the worst storm year in GMP’s 11-year data record. The company incurred $53.6 million in total storm costs, including $45.2 million in major storm expense alone. And 2024 followed with $47 million in total storm costs. Two years of storms accounted for nearly half of all the storm damage GMP recorded over 11 years. The $6 million annual collection covered roughly 13 cents of every dollar in major storm damage incurred in those peak years.
By January 2026, GMP filed its FY2027 rate case, seeking a 7.5% increase, and disclosed that the storm fund would cease. The complete disclosure was one sentence. When Vermont’s ratepayer advocate formally asked GMP to provide a year-by-year table of fund collections and expenditures, GMP essentially declined. It pointed to quarterly filings spread across two separate regulatory dockets and told the regulator that the information was “already available.” No table or verification. They just pointed to a bureaucratic maze that most residential ratepayers would need weeks to navigate. The move suggests that utilities do not consider dockets a place where everyday people might need plain language guidance to understand what will affect their livelihoods.
In New York, a parallel story is unfolding in New York State Electric and Gas’ (NYSEG) service territory. The utility filed for a 35% increase in electric delivery revenues last June. The filing landed on top of a separate Recovery Charge that had already begun appearing on customer bills last February, tied to $710 million in bonds issued to cover nearly a decade of accumulated storm costs. Customers are being asked to pay for the storms twice: once to retire the debt and again to fund the hardening investments the company says will mitigate increasing recovery costs. An independent audit released the same month as the rate filing found that NYSEG had missed its enforceable reliability targets for six consecutive years. And customers are already funding multiple rounds of rate increases explicitly justified as investments in grid resilience.
The pattern is a business model.
Who’s in the Room and Who Isn’t
Utility rate cases are decided in proceedings that look like courtrooms. There is testimony and cross-examination. Detailed exhibits are entered into the record. The parties with legal representation and expert witnesses are the parties with resources to sustain that kind of participation.
The people who are affected by the outcomes almost never appear in the case, because the barrier to participation is genuinely prohibitive. The dockets run to hundreds of thousands of pages. The filings reference prior proceedings going back years. Understanding what a utility is actually asking for requires the kind of institutional expertise that most people simply don’t have the time or resources to develop.
This is the accountability gap that utility regulation was designed to prevent and has done little in practice to close.
Why 2026 Matters
Rate increases of the magnitude being requested across the country are landing on kitchen tables at a moment when many households are already stretched. Utility affordability is not abstract for everyday people in 2026. It affects every household; disproportionately burdens lower-income families; and compounds with rising food costs, insurance premiums, and healthcare expenses.
Utilities are right that storms are worsening and are causing more expensive damage. But those facts do not resolve the question of who bears the cost, how the accounting is done, or whether the evidence supports what utilities are asking for.
Those questions are being answered right now, in regulatory dockets most people have never heard of.
Politicians who want to talk about energy affordability need to understand regulatory proceedings. Saying utility bills are too high is easy. Doing something about it requires visible, deeper engagement.
They need to demonstrate that they can find funding for ratepayer advocates to match utility resources. They need to push for plain-language disclosure requirements so that when a utility shifts storm funding tactics, the accounting isn’t buried.
The 2026 election cycle is the right moment to ensure utility ratemaking on storm cost recovery is transparent. Rate cases are decided in public proceedings. The decisions being made in those dockets right now will appear on customer bills beginning this fall, as voters head to the polls. Candidates who want to talk about affordability should be asked, specifically, what they intend to do about the system producing these bills. The playbook is in the docket. It’s time to open it.
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Jesse Jackson, Civil Rights Leader Who Fought for Economic Justice, Dies at 84
"His unwavering belief in justice, equality, and love uplifted millions, and we ask you to honor his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by," said Jackson's family.
Feb 17, 2026
Rev. Jesse Jackson, a renowned civil rights activist and two-time US presidential candidate who pushed for a multiracial movement united around the common fight for economic justice, has died at the age of 84, his family announced in a statement on Tuesday.
"Our father was a servant leader—not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world," said Jackson's family. "We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family. His unwavering belief in justice, equality, and love uplifted millions, and we ask you to honor his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by."
The family's statement does not specify a cause of death, saying Jackson "died peacefully" on Tuesday morning. Jackson was formally diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy last year after managing the condition for more than a decade.
After taking part in and organizing sit-ins and other civil rights actions as a university student, Jackson worked alongside Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and was later elevated to national director of SCLC's economic arm, Operation Breadbasket.
Jackson ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, amassing more than 10 million votes across both campaigns—making him, up to that time, the most successful Black presidential candidate in US history.
In his 1984 speech at the Democratic National Convention, Jackson made the case for a "Rainbow Coalition" organized around a common mission: "to feed the hungry; to clothe the naked; to house the homeless; to teach the illiterate; to provide jobs for the jobless; and to choose the human race over the nuclear race."
"We must leave racial battleground and come to economic common ground and moral higher ground," said Jackson. "America, our time has come. We come from disgrace to amazing grace."
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Mamdani Taps 'Unafraid and Unbought' Julie Su as First NYC Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice
"What a thrilling day for the working class of New York City," said one local labor leader.
Dec 19, 2025
In a move cheered by advocates for the working class, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani said Friday that former acting US Labor Secretary Julie Su will serve as the city's first-ever deputy mayor for economic justice.
"Welcome to a new era, Julie Su," Mamdani, a Democrat, said in a social media post announcing the appointment. "As former US secretary of labor, Julie played a central role in fighting for workers, ensuring a just day's pay for a hard day's work, and saving the pensions of more than a million union workers and retirees."
Speaking at a Friday press conference in Staten Island with Mamdani and Deputy Mayor for Housing nominee Leila Bozorg, Su said: "In the richest city in the richest country in the world, no one should be treated as disposable. Dignity on the job is not a privilege but a right, justice is not abstract but it is felt in a paycheck you can live on, a schedule that you can build a life around, a workplace where your voice matters, and a city that has your back.”
Su, who had previously served as California labor secretary and deputy US labor secretary, was nominated by former President Joe Biden to permanently lead the Department of Labor. However, Republicans and some right-wing Democrats in the US Senate blocked her appointment, so Biden installed her in an acting capacity, in which she served from March 2023 until the end of the Democrat's administration in January.
During her tenure, Su championed gig workers; fought to preserve pensions for retirees; pushed for workplace protections from Covid-19 and environmental harms; and helped negotiate labor agreements for healthcare professionals, flight attendants, and others.
Su will now work with Mamdani, a democratic socialist, as he seeks to deliver on his campaign promises of free public childcare and municipal buses, a freeze on rent-stabilized housing, and city-owned grocery stores to residents of the nation's largest city.
"What a thrilling day for the working class of New York City to have the first-ever deputy mayor for economic justice to ensure that our issues are front [and] center at every level of city government," New York Taxi Workers Alliance executive director Bhairavi Desai said in a statement.
"With the appointment of the esteemed Julie Su—who is unafraid and unbought by corporate interests—Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is cementing the highest, uncompromised, and effective standards for a better life for New Yorkers abandoned and betrayed in decades past," Desai added.
The NYC Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO said on Bluesky: "Big news! Julie Su as deputy mayor for economic justice brings deep experience enforcing labor law, fighting wage theft, and standing up for working families."
"She’s known and respected across the labor movement, including here in NYC," the council added. "Looking forward to working with a proven champion for workers at City Hall!"
Service Employees International Union international president April Verrett said on X that Su "has spent her career standing with workers and holding powerful interests to account."
"Bringing her into City Hall says New York is done talking and ready to throw down for the people who keep this city moving," she added.
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