Nine months after approving a settlement to unbundle the Southern California Gas Co. backbone transmission and underground storage systems, stakeholders and California regulators are still waiting for it to happen (see Daily GPI, March 18; Dec. 12, 2001)

A top staff member at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) indicated Thursday that he will call hearings to ferret out the array of filings from SoCalGas and other parties that are squabbling over the implementation. To date, the main thrust of the settlement has yet to be realized. There is also a separate application to rehear (and perhaps kill) the restructuring.

“The implementation of the [December 2001 gas restructuring] decision has turned out to be far more complicated than any of us expected,” said Paul Clanon, director of the Energy Branch of the CPUC. “We now have a total of eleven advice letters [separate filings] from SoCalGas dealing with various aspects of the order, and three of those have been supplemented, so we have a ton of paper in from SoCal.”

Most of the filings (7) by the large gas distribution utility have drawn an inordinate amount of comments from stakeholders, including a number of the parties that signed the settlement that was approved for implementation by the CPUC. “Some of these advice letters, interestingly, are opposed by some of the people who signed on to the agreement, so there are substantial disagreements even among some of those who supported the restructuring,” Clanon told CPUC commissioners at a bimonthly business meeting in San Francisco.

What Clanon calls “maybe the cornerstone” of the whole thing — the unbundling of interstate transmission — has proven to be the most troubling of the SoCalGas advice letters, the CPUC staff official said.

Clanon said he and Commissioner Carl Wood decided that hearings were needed to avoid dealing with the implementation on a piecemeal basis. It turns out, he said, that in reviewing the filings in May, there may be outstanding issues of fact, meaning that a simple continuation hearing for implementation may not be enough, Clanon said.

Because of internal staffing conflicts and heavy summer requirements on electric issues, Clanon told commissioners that the staff has not been able to implement the gas settlement. He told the commissioners that he still “strongly recommends” hearings be held, and he “deeply regrets” that he hasn’t gotten it done yet.

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