Letter to Southwest Gas Corp.:

Given the adverse and devastating impact that your corporation's recent and unjustified rate increases have had on people struggling to make ends meet, your statements indicating interest in "saving me money" and continuing to provide "economical" natural gas service, while at the same time threatening additional security and late charges, is really pathetic and laughable.

As a retired senior facilities/energy engineer and corporate officer with 30 years experience working with (or attempting to work with) some of the largest utility companies in the United States, your corporation's rate increases are unwarranted.

While we in the private sector do our jobs with optimization engineering and energy management, reducing our electricity and fuels usage as much as 40 percent, utility company MBA-type spreadsheet managers, living in mortal fear of the monthly P&L, view these reductions solely as "loss of revenue." Instead of instituting optimization methodologies to clean up the layers and layers of bureaucracy and inefficiencies within their own organizations, these spreadsheet managers use arbitrary "slash and burn" tactics to artificially fatten the monthly bottom line ... short-term fixes that continually worsen the long-term outlook.

When the short-term tactics fail, these MBA-types then run whining to the taxpayer-funded, politically expedient Public Utility Commission bureaucrats to lobby for rate increases to fix their failed short-term tactics and artificially inflate share value for the stock-optioned fat cats at the top, and with little regard to the hardships imposed on working men/women and their families.

These recent natural gas rate increases by your corporation have the same odor as the fabricated so-called energy crisis scam in California of last year ... a corporate scheme to steal from the people to enrich the few.

Perhaps if more customers protested by withholding payment, paying late and dumping inflated stock, the utility/energy companies and their pandering politicians just might get the message.

ROBERT B. DICKMAN

Minden