A public notice this week from the Colorado Office of Consumer Counsel announced that Pueblo’s main power utility, Rapid City, S.D.-based Black Hills Energy, is filing a request with the Public Utilities Commission to increase the monthly minimum charged to some of its residential customers in southern Colorado. In a addition to Pueblo, Black Hills provides power to Cañon City, Florence, Rocky Ford and Westcliffe.

Before anyone loses his cool, let’s note that this is actually a follow-up to a scaled-back rate hike approved by the PUC last fall. The Office of Consumer Counsel’s public notice explains:

As required by the PUC, Black Hills filed its “Phase II” electric rate case on Friday, July 7 in order to implement the PUC’s decision, issued on December 19, 2016, which lowered Black Hills’ proposed rate increase of approximately $8.5 million to $636,267.

In the current rate case, known as the rate design phase, Black Hills is required to divide the approved rate increase between its residential and business customers. New rates, based upon the approved increase, began being charged on January 1, 2017, on a temporary basis and were based on the existing rate design. However, the current phase may result in a new rate design that may change the temporary rates charged to residential and business customers. The PUC must approve Black Hills’ proposed rate design or may order modifications to it.

So, it’s more of a realignment, and it has yet to be approved by state regulators. But it’s still salt in the wounds in southern Colorado’s Steel City.

Rate hikes can leave ratepayers hot under the collar anywhere – but nowhere more so than in Pueblo, where power rates are by many accounts among the highest in Colorado. The community has been the scene of ratepayer outrage more than once in recent years in the face of successive rate hikes.

During the 2017 legislative session, Pueblo lawmakers successfully carried a bill to bring more transparency to Coloradans’ power bills – a policy nostrum that won’t do much to stop spiraling power rates but nonetheless seemed directed at Black Hills.

When the PUC has taken its show on the road and held field hearings in Pueblo to gauge public input on pending Black Hills rate hikes, locals have turned out in droves and vented their fury at the commission as well as the utility.

Even if the latest pending request is just a footnote, its timing in the dog days of summer is likely to rouse ratepayers’ ire – and perhaps prompt more legislation in the 2018 session?