The right to petition for a “redress of grievances” is guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Although it applies to the right of Americans to petition the government, The Watchdog showed a neighborhood how to use the concept to prompt a company to fix a problem lasting more than 40 years.

Since the mid-1960s, when homes on Wosley, Winifred and Woodway drives in Fort Worth’s Wedgwood East neighborhood were built, residents have complained about regular power outages.

“It just went on for all these years,” Lanelle Phipps told me. “It was reported and reported, and they would say they fixed it, but it didn’t take more than 10 drops of rain for the power to go off.”

Last year, Phipps and a neighbor, Karen Erickson, decided they had had enough. The last straw for them was the February 2010 snowstorm.

“We sat here for 53 hours in the dark freezing when all of our neighbors around us had power,” Erickson said.

She called Oncor Electric Delivery, which services power lines. “You can’t get anybody. You can’t get a human voice,” she said.

One time she did. “He laughed it off and said, ‘Oh, we deal with that all the time.’ He was no help. He just told me to keep calling, keep calling.”

When Erickson described the problem to me, I wrote back with a plan:

“Easiest thing to do is organize your neighbors. Get everyone to sign a petition. Send the info to me, and I will pass it on to Oncor. … With the fuss you will kick up, Oncor will realize that they need to come out and actually fix the problem. It most likely will work.”

Phipps wrote the petition and cover letter, which stated, “Surely in all these years with all the reported outages, the problem has been (or could be) identified. …This petition is a formal request for the electric service companies to fix the problem — whatever it is. It has gone on far too long for any neighborhood to simply sit back and wait for the next inconvenient event.”

Erickson walked the petition door to door. She worked hard to catch everyone but eventually she did: 29 homeowners. Everyone signed the petition. It took seven months.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

More Watchdog Nation News:

Watchdog Nation Partners with Mike Holmes

America meets Watchdog Nation/Listen to Fun Radio Interview

Watchdog Nation Debuts New e-Book and Multi-CD Audio Book

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

In November, I passed the petition on to Oncor. Good things happened after that. Oncor staffers held a meeting and reviewed the neighborhood’s power history back to the beginning. When an Oncor employee contacted Phipps, she told Phipps, “I guess your petition got in the hands of the right people.”

An Oncor representative told me that the neighborhood had eight outages in the past year, five caused by weather and three for other reasons.

In December, Oncor began trimming trees. Oncor said that’s the easiest and best way to minimize weather-related outages. But the neighbors knew that it was more than that.

Once the trees were trimmed, there were still outages, Phipps said. She insisted that other measures be tried. More workers showed up.

As Erickson wrote to me, “They admitted that a lot of our equipment is out of date, and they will be updating with new equipment. They went back to Day One, and based on the number of complaints and outages, have decided that the equipment has always been defective.”

Oncor trucks remained in the neighborhood for several weeks. Among the work they did: Damaged lightning arresters were replaced; wiring was replaced; new cross arms and holding arms were installed.

Since then, there hasn’t been a problem.

Oncor says that if you have a problem, visit AskOncor.com and send a message from that site. Or call the Ask Oncor Hotline at 888-875-6279.

But I like the petition idea. If the story of excessive power outages in this neighborhood rings true to what’s happening in your neighborhood, why not try it same way? Get everyone in the neighborhood to sign a petition.

# # #

Dave Lieber shows Americans how to fight back against corporate deceptions in his wonderful book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong. Are you tired of losing time, money and aggravation to all the assaults on our wallets? Learn how to fight back with ease — and win. Get the book here.

Read The Watchdog Nation manifesto here!

Visit Watchdog Nation Headquarters

Like Watchdog Nation on Facebook

Watch Watchdog Nation on YouTube

Twitter @DaveLieber

Watchdog Nation introduces you to another watchdog. His name is Riley. He’s 14 months old. A Vizsla. A real dog.

From his point of view, it’s easy to see why he might have nipped at the gloved hand that reached over the fence in his back yard in Crowley, Texas.

The hand belonged to a smart-meter installer from Oncor Electric Delivery.

The installer’s other hand reached for his can of HALT! — a dog repellent spray — and fired away.

Riley ran back into his house. His eyes had swollen, and he wiped his head frantically on the carpet. His owners, Carter and Mandy Forbes, didn’t know what had happened. They rushed him to the vet, where the doctor explained that someone had apparently sprayed the dog with repellent. Riley was treated and released. The bill was $90.

Back home after that, Mandy Forbes saw an Oncor installer in the neighborhood. She says she watched him take off his hard hat and butt a neighborhood Chihuahua that was barking at him in the head.

“Did you spray my dog?” she says she asked him.

“I haven’t done it in six months,” he replied.

“Do you have the right to do that?”

“Yes,” he answered. “If we feel threatened.”

She told him what Riley went through. He apologized but said it must have been the other installer working the neighborhood.

The Forbeses contacted Oncor. Days later, the company, which delivers electricity to much of North Texas, agreed to pay the medical bill.

Oncor doesn’t like to pay claims. But it did so in this case because the installer didn’t follow company policy.

“It was really in the spirit of customer service that we decided to pay this claim,” spokeswoman Megan Wright said. “There wasn’t anything legally that would make us pay this claim. But the fact that the meter installer did not knock before he installed the meter, which is not required by law, we felt that we wanted to pay this claim.”

The front-door knock, she said, is “something we like to do as a courtesy.”

When I pressed for more details, she said, “His body was not bit, but he said the dog’s teeth did make contact with his really thick gloves.”

Riley is fine. The installer, however, was reprimanded. “We tell our employees they have to put their safety first,” Wright said. “He had to do what he could to protect himself.”

Previously, I’ve reported how smart-meter installers have the right to climb backyard fences to change out meters and how, during the installation, the power to your home or business will go off for several minutes. I’ve recommended that you install surge protectors on valuable electronics and even consider purchasing a whole-house surge protector, usually best installed by an electrician. Oncor says it doesn’t pay claims on electronics that are ruined by power surges.

As far as dog bites, Oncor says installers have been bitten by dogs 12 times this year and were bitten 22 times last year.

Oncor provided me with photos of installers and the nasty bites they received. The photos are difficult to look at.

Oncor says it trains installers how to handle dogs without spraying them.

“We talk to them about how to spot the danger signs of aggression,” Wright said. “How to walk away. Move slowly and carefully. You don’t look in a dog’s eyes. You do not smile, because you don’t want to show your teeth. The dog will think that’s an aggressive move.

“Never run. You just stay calm and quiet. We also talk to installers about being aware of their surroundings, looking to see if there are any dog toys, dog runs, well-worn paths.

“Our meter readers also carry with them a stick with a little tennis ball on the end of it. The dog will oftentimes attack the tennis ball.

“No one wants to hurt an animal.”

Oncor has almost 2 million smart meters left to install. That’s a lot of back yards to enter — and a lot of watchdogs that have no idea what’s coming.

# # #

Dog bite stats

• 2005 – 43 dog bites
• 2006 – 31 dog bites
• 2007 – 32 dog bites
• 2008 – 27 dog bites
• 2009 – 22 dog bites
• As of 8/1/2010 – 12 dog bites

Source: ONCOR

# #  #

Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new 2010 edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is out. Revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber

After he saw my report on Oncor Electric Delivery’s poor outage information system a week ago, reader Doug Edwards of Dallas summarized my findings better in 18 words than I did in a thousand.

“It looks like you got the brush off from Oncor everybody else is. They always say `Tomorrow, Tomorrow …’ ” was the message he sent via my Twitter feed.

He’s right.

I had asked Oncor why the company couldn’t do better at providing power outage information to the public, especially during a major storm.

But what happened? I got steered into an explanation about how everything will be better in two or three years because we’ll have smart meters.

So last week, I tried again. I pressed Oncor harder when I previewed its new smart meter exhibit, soon to be visiting a county fair near you.

Because North Texas gets its share of severe weather, it’s hard to understand why Oncor won’t do a better job of informing the public when neighborhoods are dark, when crews are working to restore power and when it’s finally restored.

Oncor doesn’t offer that service. That also means that the news media can’t report the latest information to a wider public.

Yet last week I found two electricity transmission companies similar to Oncor that do tell their customers what is happening during bad weather in modern, quick and efficient ways.

AEP Texas, which serves a giant swath of West Texas, presents on its Web site a real-time listing and accompanying color map — broken down by ZIP code — that shows how many customers have lost power.

The information comes from telephone complaints by customers, which are then transferred to the Web site, spokesman Larry Jones said. The site is updated every few minutes. Parent company American Electric Power offers real-time outage alerts in the 11 states it serves.

In Florida, Kissimmee Utility Authority created an outage alert system five years ago that sends text alerts or e-mails to anyone who signs up, giving the number of affected customers by ZIP code. Updates give customers an idea of how quickly the problem is being fixed.

Spokesman Chris Gent says the authority’s system preceded Twitter, which was developed a year later. Now the authority offers both a Twitter feed and its original system to customers.

The service is inexpensive, he said, because it was designed in-house and is run by staff.

The authority is experimenting with GPS devices on work trucks so that information can eventually be used, too.

Several readers called and questioned my plea for a strong Internet alert system for Oncor customers. They said they wouldn’t have electricity to access a Web site.

Remember that hand-held phones and laptops are often battery-powered. Friends and relatives can relay information to you from elsewhere. The news media uses the information. And all of this is important for families that have evacuated and want to learn when they can return.

Does Oncor have any plans to offer an outage alert system?

At the smart-meter exhibit in Lancaster, spokeswoman Jeamy Molina answered, “We’re just not at a place where that can be done right now. It goes back to the grid with the whole outage system. We know when there are widespread outages. We know where that is. It goes back to our restoration process and how it works.

“We understand that there are places that Oncor can improve on its customer service and dealing with these kinds of things. And of course, these will be things that we’ll take into account when we start seeing what we could have done better before the next storm. So that will be something that will come up. But right now, Oncor is not at that place.”

What about the near future?

“It’s stuff that will be talked about, of course,” she continued. “We’ll take this back to our team. We have to review steps about what could be done.”

As my Twitter pal sang in his tweet: “Tomorrow, Tomorrow …”

No system’s perfect

OK, I have a smart-meter story for you. Those are the 21st-century meters that connect directly to the electric company. You can monitor your power usage and set your smart appliances to run at off-peak times. Most Texas electric customers will have one in a few years.

Oncor took a lot of, uh, heat from customers in recent weeks in Killeen and Temple. Soon after their smart meters were installed, their bills jumped. But Oncor says that the increase was due to the cold weather and that it tested about 500 meters and all were accurate.

Even though smart meters are designed to eliminate humans and our errors, there is still that possibility. When an old meter is removed, the final reading is recorded by — gasp — a human.

And wouldn’t you know it? Sometimes people make mistakes. About a dozen so far when it comes to smart-meter conversions, Oncor says.

There’s this one fellow who had a smart meter installed nine months ago at his home in the Austin area (not served by Oncor).

When he received the first bill afterward, he recalls, “It looked like they overcharged me 1,000 kilowatts.”

He called Austin Energy to complain. “The meter reader, in closing out, put the decimal point in the wrong place,” he says. “I was charged an extra 1,000 kwh. So there’s that potential element for human error.”

And who is this fellow who was done wrong?

His name is Terry Hadley.

His job?

He’s the spokesman for the Public Utility Commission of Texas.

If it can happen to him …

Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new 2010 edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is out. Revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber

The battle cry for residents in a seniors community in Fort Worth, Texas goes like this:

“I’m gettin’ beat ’cause I want to use some heat!”

Residents tried to figure out why their electric bills have doubled in the past few months.

Last week, they called a meeting and invited me. They showed me their bills, almost all of them from TXU Energy. They had a lot of theories about what went wrong — meters not read properly, for example.

After I bit, as I first reported in the Jan. 31, 2010 Dave Lieber column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, I gave them my initial expert opinion.

It was bitterly cold in late December. Of course bills go up.

But then I dug deeper into their cases, looking at their bills and asking each resident two crucial questions:

What kilowatt-per-hour rate do you pay?

When does your contract expire?

Almost nobody knew the answers. Their problem, it seems, is much worse than high winter bills. Most likely, these residents are paying more than necessary because they haven’t shopped around for electricity. Unfortunately, many Texans still don’t know how to do that.

We worked on their cases, and in the end, I hope I solved their problem. Best of all, my solution may work for you, too. But before we get to that, let’s listen to a few of the residents:

Martha Beaman: “My bill was $28 in November. Then, in December, it was $256. And for January, it was $233. I am never at home. I work. This is stressful because my wages haven’t gone up as the bill goes up. I have to calculate every penny I earn because my job has been cut back on hours this month. I’m struggling.”

Shirley Stockton: “I knew the cold weather was coming and cranked my heater down to 65. I turned my water heater off through the cold snap, and the bill still went from $36 to $96. I only turn my water heater on every few days when I need it.” (When she called to tell a TXU rep that, she says the rep told her that hot water “is a privilege.”)

Debbie Wilson: Her bill jumped from $78 to $176 to $272: “After I got the high bill for December, I cut my thermostat to 67. I use oxygen at night, so I have to have enough electricity to pay for that. I’d rather go cold than not have my air at night.”

Anita Mayfield: Her bill went from $64 to $149. “I’m getting tired of cooking on a microwave. I wear sweats all the time. I have the thermostat turned down to 60 degrees. I wash in cold water. When you live on a fixed income, you can’t afford this. You don’t know where you are going to pay these extras from.”

Charlie Berry: His bill went from $40 to $176 to $227. “At this rate, by the time I get the next bill, I’m going to have to apply for assistance from the U.S. government just to pay my electric bill.”

Steve Kerr: “During the cold snap I was out of town for three weeks with the heating system turned off.” His bill went from $90 to $146 to $236. He is skeptical about whether the meter was read. “Whether or not it was read — that’s the $64,000 question,” he says.

Oncor spokeswoman Carol Peters said later that the bills are higher because this has been the second-coldest winter in the past two decades. “There’s a 30 percent increase in the heating requirements over last year,” she said. Oncor delivers the electricity through the lines and hires the meter readers. TXU is the residents’ retail provider by their choice.

TXU spokeswoman Sophia Stoller looked at 13 cases of Providence Village residents provided by The Watchdog. All but one seemed accurate, she said. In the questionable case, the initial bill looked too low.

TXU offers several ways for customers to get help with their bills, including a 10 percent discount as part of the Low Income Discount Plan. But you have to ask. TXU Energy Aid helps customers who say they have a hardship, such as loss of job or illness.

When I looked at the residents’ bills, I found that many are paying as much as 13, 14 or 15 cents per kilowatt-hour.

However, last week, the state-run PowertoChoose.org Web site showed the lowest prices I’ve seen — 8.5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

So the quickest way to lower your electric bill is not to turn down a thermostat or turn off a water heater but to learn when your contract expires and shop for a better deal. If there’s a cancellation fee, it will be more than covered in a few months by cutting a 15-cent rate almost in half.

As proof, one Providence Village resident said she paid $250 to cancel her contract before it expired so she could switch to Green Mountain Energy. Her neighbors sighed when Helen Nash reported that her recent bill was only $93.

If you’re not sure about the best way to shop around, I’ve got you covered. I’ve distributed tens of thousands of free copies of my guide showing how to get the best buy in Texas electricity. You can find it by clicking here on “Dave Lieber Guide to Saving on Your Electricity Bill.”

You can also e-mail me at watchdog@star-telegram.com or request a copy at Dave Lieber, Star-Telegram, P.O. Box 1870, Fort Worth, TX 76101.

---

What to do If you need help on your electric bill, call 211.

Customers who receive food stamps or Medicaid may qualify for the Lite Up Texas discount or other assistance.

Ask your electric company whether it offers assistance. Also ask to pay a big bill over several months, allowed under law.

On Feb. 3, 2010, Tarrant County Human Services will take applications from those who are retired or on disability and receive no other income. Call 817-531-5620 on Wednesday and ask for an appointment. Only 500 appointments will be scheduled.

Source: Tarrant County Human Services

# # #

Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new 2010 edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is out. Revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber