Dear Editor,
The law is an interesting concept. On paper it is supposed to protect the law abiding and honest from the wrongs and criminal acts of others. If it’s a criminal act then you call the police and they arrest the bad guy and the public prosecutor does his job and the evil doer is punished. If it’s a civil wrong then, ostensibly, you get yourself a lawyer who sues the other guy and a judge decides whether you are right or not and the problem is resolved. Great concepts all of them, and the foundation of civilized societies as we know them, but what do you do when your own government are the criminals?
By now everyone knows the story. GEBE, a government operated enterprise, through its management told everyone that asked that solar installations were fine, that there were no regulations defining them and that if production exceeded consumption “you won’t get a bill.” Crystal clear, no ambiguity. Based on this promise, lots of people spent a lot of money, and I mean LOTS of money into the strong five figure range, to install complex and technologically advanced solar systems and became energy independent. Well, and again as you already know, it turned out that GEBE was lying and as soon as they could figure out how to do it they installed meters that prevent energy storage. What this means is that an individual only gets benefit from his very expensive installation if production exceeds consumption at that precise moment in time over the course of the day and then ONLY what the consumption is. Any extra gets stolen by GEBE and resold to someone else at retail rates.
In the month of May, I produced 3,430KWH or roughly US $775 worth of electricity. My consumption was roughly 1000kwh or about $225 worth. On the face of it, a rational person might think that giving GEBE about $550 worth of electricity for free BEYOND what I used might be good enough… but no… they felt it necessary to not only steal the $550, but to bill me for an additional 400 plus KWH. I suppose the fact that they didn’t use a ski mask and a handgun might mean they didn’t actually steal it as we mere mortals understand the term. The lawyers like to call it “conversion.” That’s where someone sneaky and dishonest finds a way to take what’s yours and make it theirs without paying you for it in some way.
So off I went to the lawyers to sue them. Very interesting that exercise. First of all, finding a lawyer that wasn’t already on GEBE’s payroll was almost impossible. Seems GEBE has just about every lawyer in town tied up. Ultimately, I found one and some additional interesting information developed. It seems that beyond the $400 plus an hour it’s going to cost to sue them, you can’t just file a complaint and get in front of a judge for a response. It turns out that you have to “build a file” first. That means you write a bunch of letters and requests for information, each one of which in my case cost $1,500, which are either ignored or returned as stone-walled answers, Only after you have burned up maybe $10,000 in letter writing can you go to court and spend another $20,000 or $30,000 to get to a hearing. And the letter writing itself was very entertaining. The one I did commission was sent and formally requested, under some statute, a variety of documents including the GEBE concession that Government is supposedly obligated to supply, again, under statute.
The reply from government was particularly fascinating. They provided all the documents that said nothing at all and had no substance. They failed to supply the concession from which, I am pretty sure, could be determined that GEBE is acting illegally with this whole “stealing energy from solar producers” deal and ended the letter with an absolutely wonderful catch-all paragraph that I will summarize . It says: “please note and be advised that under statute xyx we are not obligated to give you ANY documents that might help you and hurt us when you sue us.” In effect it means “remember that statute that says we, as government, have to be open and honest with you? Forget it. We don’t have to tell you anything that might help you prove we are the criminals you think we are.
The lawyers just shrug their shoulders. At $400 an hour they are happy to write letters and stonewall each other until their clients are bankrupt. If you are the one getting screwed by GEBE it means that the truth of the matter is simply that you have no reasonable access to the courts. No one is going to spend $30,000 and fight this thing to the Hague to remedy a $200-per-month electricity bill. Government knows that and so does GEBE, and that’s why there is no “small claims “ court here where an individual can stand in front of a judge and plead his case because if there was then government and GEBE would spend its life in court getting hammered.
The great Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko who spent a career writing about the most corrupt city in America once wrote “You can’t fight City Hall.” Nowhere is that truer than here.
Steven Johnson
