DN Editorial: Our main concern

CITY COUNCIL'S messy killing of the deal for UIL Holdings Corp. to buy the city-owned Philadelphia Gas Works is a nasty gift that just keeps on giving.

This week, the Public Utilities Commission, the state agency charged with overseeing the state's utilities, including their safe operation, renewed its concerns about the city's aging cast-iron gas mains, and suggested that the $18 million payment that PGW makes to the city each year should be directed to gas-main replacement.

The PUC is concerned about the safety of the aging gas mains, one of the many issues addressed during the long and ultimately frustrating process of the purchase of the city-owned gas company.

Half of Philadelphia's 3,000 miles of gas mains are considered "high risk" - second only to New York. Eleven people have died in PGW gas-main explosions in the past 35 years.

PGW's current schedule for updating gas mains would see completion in 2103 - 88 years from now. Council claims that UIL hadn't agreed to rapid gas-main replacement, though UIL had made a point throughout the process that, as a private company, it would be in a better position to be able to finance an accelerated gas-main replacement schedule, with the goal of cutting the current schedule by half.

UIL also made gas-main replacement a point of a marketing campaign while Council was pretending to deliberate over the pending sale. After the city received UIL's bid, Council dragged its feet, commissioned a study that took months and, finally, without public hearing or frankly any good reason they killed the deal.

To add injury to stupidity, Council's reaction to PUC's recent concerns about gas mains defies belief: Councilwoman Marian Tasco, who heads the gas commission, which oversees PGW, said that the PUC was using gas-main safety as "a red herring," and said that the PUC, in airing its concerns, was trying to punish the city.

Calling safety a "red herring" strikes us as a totally irresponsible statement from the head of the city's gas commission.

(Tasco announced Monday she was retiring from Council . . . for the second time. She retired for one day in 2011 to collect a $478,000 DROP check. Maybe it's time to also address whether the Gas Commission should be retired.)

The Nutter administration is not happy about the prospect of forgoing the $18 million payment that PGW is supposed to make to the city. No one in the city should be. Already, the city had to forgo this payment for seven years, since PGW was in such dire financial straits.

PGW has, of course, made great organizational and management strides in the past decade to move out of the disastrous mess it was once in. But even under the best of circumstances, it's still a struggling company with a huge debt. Its sale would have helped stabilize the company, helped bring down the city's pension obligation and gotten the city out of the business of utilities.

The PUC's safety concerns underscores just what a misstep Council made in killing the sale. Even if the UIL sale wasn't perfect, it was a sale that could have solved many problems. The utility's eroding and possibly dangerous infrastructure is one of them.

Preventing deadly gas explosions is the ultimate responsibility of PUC. Morally, if one happens, Council should have to answer for it.