Congressman calls for resignation
In a speech on the floor of the U.S. House on Wednesday (Feb. 1), Rep. Pat Ryan called for the president and CEO of Central Hudson to resign.
Ryan, a Democrat whose district includes Beacon, said that Charles Freni Jr. bears responsibility for the utility’s recent billing problems.
“Since my calls for an investigation into Central Hudson’s disastrous billing practices almost a year ago, we’ve received more than 11,000 formal complaints,” Ryan said. A state report found Central Hudson’s billing system “riddled with hundreds of programming errors” that led to “nearly 5,000 customers not receiving their bills, 8,000 customers being overcharged, and more than 30,000 customers whose auto pay was billed incorrectly, costing them over $16 million.”
In response to the report, Ryan said, “Central Hudson doubled down on their deflection, denial, and deception. Rather than taking ownership of their failures, they claimed no customers were overcharged and that nobody lost money.”
In a statement, Joseph Jenkins, a representative for Central Hudson, said: “We are aware of comments made by Congressman Pat Ryan. Central Hudson continues to apologize for the unfortunate impacts that implementation of the new system has had on our customers and key stakeholders…. Central Hudson is working to ensure that customers who received bills requiring an adjustment have been made whole.”
Assuming the numbers are correct, shame on CenHud. However, I wonder if all 5,000 customers who did not receive their bills contacted Central Hudson? For example: “I didn’t receive my bill for the month of April — would you kindly send it to me?”