This is the conclusion of a two-part story.

By JIM BARON

BURRILLVILLE — The Pascoag Utility District is owned by its customers, so when one of the owners falls behind on his or her bill, the situation is dealt with differently than it is with the big statewide power company.

The utility district is owned by the residents and property owners in Pascoag, who elect a board of commissioners to run the business.
“An electric utility makes no money from a meter when it is shut off,” says Pascoag Utility District General Manager Ted Garille. “But you can’t run a utility without being paid, either. And that is very much magnified with a utility like Pascoag that is not-for-profit.”
Pascoag pursues what Garille calls a “positively aggressive” program for collecting on overdue bills.
If someone gets behind, they will get a late notice and maybe even a shut-off notice, he said. “But before the shut-off we will call and establish communications. We tell people, before this gets totally out of control, before you have no hope of climbing out of this hole, talk to us, work with us, and we’ll work with you. Give us $10 a month for good faith (along with keeping current on new bills)” to keep the power on.
Also before a shut-off, Garille said, “we send employees out to knock on doors. In many cases, there are children at home and the parents are both out working, so my employees have the latitude to not turn something off if they feel there are extenuating circumstances.”
With the statewide utility, National Grid, when a customer makes and agreement to get turned back on and fails to keep the terms of that agreement, they have to pay an increasingly larger percentage of their back bill to get restored once again and payment terms become stricter.
Not so when the customers own the company.
“If someone breaks an agreement, which happens, unfortunately, more than I would like, we don’t turn our backs on them and say, ‘that’s it, you wronged me.’ We call them and start the process over again.” Pascoag’s repayment program, Garille says, is likely to be more lenient than a customer would get going through the Division of Pubic Utilities and Carriers hearing and appeal process.
 In fact, Pascoag petitioned the PUC (as did National Grid) to request that they be allowed latitude working with delinquent customers, when they wanted to forbid utilities from offering less strict programs.
But patience can run out, even when the delinquent customer is an owner.
“You have to draw a line somewhere,” Garille says. “At some point in time it stops being a cooperative effort and you become an enabler.
Last fall, just before the start of the winter moratorium on utility shut offs of low-income “protected” customers that begins November 1, Pascoag sent out about 1,100 shut-off notices. “That’s something that troubled me a great deal because it is almost 25 percent of our (approximately 5,000) customers, Garille said. “Sometimes, they won’t listen and you have to get their attention. And we did that.”
After one round of shut-offs, he remembers, there were four households still off at the end of the day. For Pascoag, that was a lot. But as it turned out, two of those customers were back on the next day and the other two had moved away.
If it does come to a shut-off for non-payment, however, Pascoag conducts those on Thursdays. On those Thursdays, they keep the district office open until 7 p.m., so if customers can scrape up the money to be turned back on, they need not stay in the dark overnight. They also have an employee who can restore power to a home on duty until 7 p.m.
That lenience is not just Garille’s salesmanship. As harsh a critic of public utilities as the Gorge Wiley Center’s Henry Shelton is, he finds good words for Pascoag Utility District.
“They seem to be much more conscious of the people in their system,” Shelton said. “Much more outgoing, much more willing to have outreach, work out solution. In the last two years, one (low-income) customer has been shut off then turned back on. You compare National Grid and hundreds have been shut off.”
Several years ago, Shelton recalled, before there was a National Grid, and utility companies in this area went under names like Blackstone Valley Gas and Blackstone Valley Electric, he and other consumer advocates tried to get legislation for a bond issue that would allow the customers of the Blackstone Valley to buy and own those companies like people in Pascoag own and control the utility district.
But, Shelton said, the legislation went nowhere.
David Graves, spokesman for National Grid, knows shut-offs don’t make a utility popular.
“I understand that people are frustrated,” Graves told The Times, “But the fact is, almost as many customers get turned back on as get shut off.”
For example, he said, during the period from April 15 of this year to June 30, National Grid terminated 7,000 customers for non-payment. By last week, he said, 4,900 had been turned back on. “The overwhelming majority has their service restored. It’s unfortunately a story that doesn’t get told.”
According to figures provided by the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), Pascoag shut off 140 customers during the same period and 127 were restored.
If you can restore 4,900 customers out of 7,000, then you have to be working very hard to work with customers and make sure they remain customers because that is our goal: to maintain a relationship with a customer. We will try to work out a payment program, see if they are eligible for energy assistance payments, anything we can possibly to help them remain a customer.”
But, he adds, “it is for the benefit of all customers for us to do everything we can to collect past due amounts. In the long run, a portion of that debt is into bills that all customers pay. We think it is only fair that those customers who use the commodity, pay for the commodity.”
In all of 2007, again using PUC figures, Pascoag shut off 299 customers and restored 279 of them. National Grid shut off 18,767 that year and turned 14,763 back on. The previous year, 2006, saw Pascoag shut off 322 customers and put 306 back on while National Grid disconnected 12,397 and restored 9,378.
While those figures seem to indicate that Pascoag is more lenient about turning customers back on, the fact that National Grid is 50 times larger than Pascoag makes the shut-off figures not so disparate.
“All the people out there who are not paying their bills are not trying to beat the system,” Garille explains. “They are people who are genuinely in trouble for one reason or another.”
“As a community-based, customer-owned utility, we afford them a little extra TLC,” Garille said.