Photo by Candiche via Flickr.com

Sending the poor to pay utility bills at a payday lender is like sending the hungry for a meal in a shark tank.
It’s the worst kind of business synergy. Missouri utility regulators should halt the practice.
Payday…

Protesters reaction at a 2007 heating on a rate hike request by AmerenUE.

It isn’t easy being a utility regulator in Missouri. Hearings are filled with arcane technical jargon. Politics is hard to escape, especially for Public Service commissioners appointed by…

AmerenUE

Missouri’s largest electric utility wants to change state law so that customers could be billed for finance charges while a new nuclear power plant is being built in Callaway County.
No big deal, AmerenUE officials say. The result would be “a…

AmerenUE

A Missouri Senate committee is to vote this afternoon on a revised — but still deeply flawed — utility bill that was written to benefit the state’s largest electric company.
AmerenUE has applied for a federal permit to build a new…

AmerenUE

Missouri’s Public Service Commission is supposed to be an honest broker, fairly assessing the often conflicting interests of large utility companies and their customers.
That’s not how things have worked over the last few years. Instead, the playing field has tilted…

Utility giant AmerenUE wants to build a second nuclear power plant adjacent to its Callaway nuclear generating station near Fulton. But before it does, it wants some help from friendly members of the Missouri Legislature.
A 1976 state law, put on…

Missouri electric customers deserve all the protection they can get. But one of the few protections they currently enjoy is under heavy fire from a utility giant and its friends on the Public Service Commission.
At issue is a law that…

Jeff Davis helped engineer a deal that resulted in a blatantly anti-consumer utility law in 2005.

He helped write the rules that dictate how the law can be used to fatten utility company bottom lines.

And when one of those utilities files a…