CU, prosecutor send message to utility thieves

Utility theft, a crime estimated to cost billions nationwide, is not a major problem in Springfield. City Utilities and the Greene County Prosecutor's Office would like to keep it that way.

CU Deputy General Manager John Twitty and Greene County Prosecuting Attorney Darrell Moore recently held a joint press conference on utility theft and its impact on the community.

"One of the reasons that we're glad to join with Mr. Twitty and the board of City Utilities in this effort is to make sure we're ahead of the curve," Moore said.

"We haven't had a significant problem yet and I emphasize that word yet with utility theft. What we're trying to say to the community is we're not going to let it get any worse."

Penalties for persons found guilty of utility theft will range from a minimum of 80 hours of public service i.e. picking up trash along the highway for misdemeanor offenses to incarceration in the case of conviction for power supply tampering, a Class C felony.

The crime

According to Mark Viguet, senior manager of marketing and communications for CU, from 1997 to 2000, there were 5,470 investigations of possible utility theft situations where something appeared abnormal and was checked out by staff. About half of the situations checked out; the other half were theft.

Since utilities are stolen by bypassing the metering equipment that measures usage, it is impossible to put an exact dollar amount on each crime.

Nationally, the impact of utility service theft is estimated at anywhere from $400 million to $12 billion, according to a June 15, 2001, article in Fortnightly's Energy Customer Management magazine, a publication of Public Utilities Reports Inc.

Local utility thieves tend to be residential users, Twitty said.

Metering International magazine, a publication associated with the International Utilities Reve-nue Protection Association, reported in Issue 2, 2001, that energy theft is typically 80 percent residential and 20 percent commercial.

However, in terms of revenue lost, those numbers are reversed, with 80 percent of losses resulting from theft in the commercial and industrial segments.

Detection

The detective work of finding local utility thieves will fall to CU employees.

"Probably most of the time those kind of circumstances are going to be found by some city utilities personnel a meter reader, a field technician a field service person; they're going to notice something different," Twitty said.

"That information may also be found by someone in our customer services group who's doing some comparisons from one period to the next," he added

When CU suspects utility theft, it will gather all the pertinent information and transfer it in its entirety to the prosecutor's office.

It will be up to the prosecutor to determine whether charges should be filed and if there is sufficient evidence to stand up in court.

"Proving the case is pretty easy, it's just catching them, and I think it's going to be fairly simple," Moore said.