COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - A state judge has set April 20 as the start date for a trial deciding whether state-owned utility Santee Cooper should refund possibly billions of dollars to some 2.2 million ratepayers.
The date set Thursday by state Judge Jean Toal was a victory for Santee Cooper’s ratepayers, who have been certified to join together to sue the utility, and whose lawyers had been pushing for more time to prepare their case. The trial previously was slated to begin Feb. 24.
The lawsuit involves the $9 billion failed V.C. Summer nuclear project. For years, Santee Cooper’s ratepayers have paid extra fees on their monthly bills to pay for what turned out to be a doomed and very expensive project to build two nuclear powered electric generators in Jenkinsville, about 25 miles northwest of Columbia. Santee Cooper was the junior partner on the project with the now former Cayce-based SCE&G, which was acquired by Dominion Energy in January 2019.
The case seeks to force Santee Cooper to refund customers what they have already paid in higher power bills for the project while also preventing the utility from charging customers any further for the unfinished plant, news outlets reported.
“The heart of this case is that the plaintiffs don’t want to pay for something they have never received a benefit for,” plaintiffs’ attorney Whitney Harrison told Toal last week.
The April 20 trial date gives plaintiffs’ lawyers a chance to go through 25,000 pages of documents they just obtained from Santee Cooper’s lawyers at 5 p.m Wednesday. Many concern a Santee Cooper insider, Marion Cherry, who was one of that company’s on-site representatives at the nuclear project during the time it was failing, ratepayer lawyer Frank Ellerbe told Toal.
“Mr. Cherry’s documents were just produced,” Ellerbe said, adding that plaintiffs had also not yet been able to take depositions - pretrial sworn statements - of Santee Cooper’s board members. “The case is not ready for trial,” Ellerbe said.
In the effort to build two new nuclear reactors, SCE&G shouldered 55% of the costs and the on-site responsibility for overseeing the building of the project. Santee Cooper paid 45% and had Cherry and two other representatives on site to monitor what was going on.
Cherry is significant apparently because he received a voicemail in 2016 from an SCE&G whistleblower, Carlette Walker, who said that SCE&G’s executives were “breaking every friggin’ law that you can break” by mismanaging the project to meet profit goals and collect millions in bonuses. In the voicemail, which was forwarded to Santee Cooper’s top officials, Walker urged Cherry to stop Santee Cooper from paying any more money for what turned out to be a doomed nuclear project.
The jury trial, which Toal said would last no more than three weeks, will take place in Greenville, a neutral place where there are few if any customers of Santee Cooper, the former SCE&G or the rural electric cooperatives with interests in the case.
Toal, a former S.C. Supreme Court chief justice who still oversees cases on the trial level, was appointed to the case by current Chief Justice Don Beatty.
Toal also sided with ratepayers’ lawyers Thursday on other motions by:
▪ Refusing to decertify the class. Had the plaintiffs lost this ruling, they would have gone to court with only one or a few plaintiffs instead of 2.2 million. That would reduce the potential recovery from billions to thousands of dollars.
▪ Refusing at this point to put any limits on Santee Cooper’s potential liabilities in the case. However, the utility’s lawyers can still push for a limit later.
Santee Cooper and SCE&G abandoned the nuclear project in July 2017 after years of construction site dysfunction and rapidly escalating costs. Dominion Energy last year agreed to a settlement that lowered SCE&G customers’ power bills but still requires them to pay $2.3 billion more for the failed project.
Federal criminal and civil fraud investigations into the case are continuing.
Although Toal provisionally moved the trial date, she made it clear to the lawyers she wanted the case tried or settled as soon as possible. Major outside policy interests stand to be affected by this case, Toal said in an apparent reference to a possible sale of Santee Cooper. Lawmakers are awaiting a report evaluating bids to buy, manage or leave under current leadership the state-owned utility.
“The need to resolve this matter outweighs” most other considerations, Toal said.
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