Missouri PSC to hold town hall to hear from Liberty customers
The Missouri Public Service Commission has scheduled hearings next month in Southwest Missouri to hear from Liberty customers who have experienced or are still experiencing problems with service and/or billing practices.
The commission on Feb. 27 ordered its staff to open an investigation after hearing from a number of customers commenting during a pending rate case by Liberty about faulty billing and poor service.
The staff of the PSC will host a series of town hall meetings on the topic June 10-12.
A town hall in Joplin is scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday, June 12, at Missouri Southern State University's Criminal Justice Center Auditorium, 3950 Newman Road.
Three other town hall meetings are scheduled in the area:
• 6 p.m. Tuesday, June 10, at the Aurora Recreation Center, 126 W. Hadley St., in Aurora
• Noon Wednesday, June 11, at the Branson Chamber of Commerce Council Room in Branson City Hall, 110 W. Maddux St.
• 6 p.m. Wednesday, June 11, at the Ozark Community Center in Ozark, 1530 W. Jackson St.
PSC staff is currently in the process of gathering information and will file a report when completed.
'The purpose of these meetings is to hear directly from you, the customer, about your experiences with Liberty Utilities,' the staff said in a written release. '... Collecting information directly from customers will assist Staff in its investigation and provide a forum for customers to interact with Liberty, OPC and Staff.'
The OPC is the Office of Public Counsel, a separate agency that represents ratepayers in hearings and rate cases before the PSC.
In a separate filing, the staff said it it had issued 74 data requests to Liberty and had received responses to 41 of those requests. It said responses to the remaining data requests were expected as they came due in the coming weeks and the staff anticipated it would need to issue new data requests as it learns more about issues related to recent complaints with customer service and billing.
Missouri Sen. Jill Carter, from Granby, held a town hall with Public Service Commission staff and Liberty officials, including Tim Wilson, president of Liberty Central Region Electric, and others on March 9 in Joplin.
At that meeting, customers spoke about receiving inaccurate bills and about not receiving bills for months at a time and getting no help over the phone or in person from Liberty's customer service representatives.
Wilson acknowledge problems with billing since April 2024, when the utility launched a change in its computer operating system of all the different utilities at Liberty to a common system used nationwide.
'I stand here before you tonight to own those,' Wilson said in March. 'And that's not been good for our customers. We implemented companywide, not just Empire, but companywide. We operate multiple utilities and in multiple states across the United States and all of them were on different operating systems. And so you can imagine the inefficiencies that come about whenever you have multiple operating systems over multiple companies.'
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