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Friday, March 29, 2024

Ilonggos appeal to Duterte: No to Panay Electric Co.

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Residents of Iloilo City have appealed to President Rodrigo Duterte, the Senate and the House of Representatives to listen to consumers’ appeal to not renew the franchise of the controversial utility firm Panay Electric Co. 

They want a new company to take over and improve electricity service in the city. PECO has been distributing electricity to Iloilo residents for 95 years.

The Ilonggo consumers said if the numerous  complaints and petition they had sent to the House and the Senate during the hearings for the franchise of PECO were not enough, they were willing to meet with and dialogue with the President and legislators to convince them there was real clamor from Iloilo City residents for the replacement of PECO with another service provider.

PECO’s franchise is set to expire on Jan. 18, 2019 and its application remains pending with the House Committee on Legislative Franchises.

According to Hazel Fernandez, a ship captain and resident of Jaro, Iloilo City, he is a victim of PECO’s bad service as he had to return to PECO continuously for five months before it acted on his complaint that he was being overbilled by an average of P4,000 every month.

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“Every month, PECO will send us a bill based on the wrong reading of the meter that even a Grade 1 pupil can do. So, what my neighbors and I did was to take a cellphone photograph of our meter reading and show it to PECO to prove that we are being overbilled. It’s such a hassle,” Fernandez said.

Eventually, an investigation showed that PECO really did not have a meter reader and its billing to customers was based on its own calculation on how much each household consumed every month, Fernandez said.

Until the Energy Regulatory Commission sent a team to settle PECO customers’ complaints in April this year, there was no consumer complaint section to handle the complaint of PECO’s customers.

A retired teacher, Ms. Mildred Jaromahum, a resident of Barangay Sinikway, Iloilo City, said she suffered nights of sleeplessness and stress because  PECO sent her a monthly bill of P114,375 in March 15, 2017 for her February consumption.

Jaromahum said she paid only P3,000 in the average monthly bill before that, and after months of follow-up with PECO, she was told to just pay it in installment instead of determining if the billing was an error.

In relation to this, Iloilo residents asked President Duterte to send a personal representative or any official of the ERC to Iloilo and meet with them so they could explain their opposition to the renewal of PECO’s franchise.

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