Fortnightly Magazine - February 15 1996

The Virginia State Corporation Commission (SCC) has stepped into the middle of a dispute between Virginia Electric and Power Co., an electric utility, and the City of Falls Church, VA. The city had planned to displace the utility as the supplier of electricity for city residents by purchasing a minimum amount of facilities from the utility and soliciting bids for power supplies outside the local system.

Despite a 1992 decision to add a new area code to prevent the projected exhaustion of telephone numbers, the Maryland Public Service Commission (PSC) has approved a plan to provide additional numbering capacity within exchanges by requiring 10-digit dialing for all customers. Future telephone lines would be assigned a new area code under the approved plan, but no existing customers would be required to change their current telephone numbers.

The Arkansas Public Service Commission (PSC) has approved a move to full competition in the telecommunication intraLATA toll market. The PSC has concluded that its earlier concerns regarding uneconomic duplication of facilities and erosion of revenues for the state's local exchange carriers (LECs) no longer justified keeping the market closed. According to the PSC, competition among interexchange carriers (IXCs) for interLATA traffic had benefited consumers by producing over 100 certificated carriers competing in price and packaging of services.

Is One Merger as Good as Another?

In late November, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) put off immediate approval of the proposed merger between The Washington Water Power Co. and Sierra Pacific Resources (to form "Altus"), and set the case for hearing. The reason? The FERC doubted whether the merger would achieve operational efficiencies between the two noncontiguous utilities.