Long fed up with Pepco's performance

Regarding the Dec. 5 front-page story "Why Pepco can't keep the lights on":

Pepco has a long way to go in earning consumer confidence. While its corporate leaders reflexively invoke "transparency," the only things transparent at Pepco are its emerging track record of poor performance and prevailing corporate culture of cover-ups, chaos and kicking the can down the road.

Pepco officials habitually use smoke and mirrors to lump power-outage causes with unrelated factors. In doing so, their tirelessly flogged "tree canopy" and "winter weather" excuses give new meaning to "not seeing the forest for the trees" and trying to "snow" regulators - and their customers. To glimpse Pepco's corporate conscience, look no further than the company's answer to finishing last in two categories in the 2008 study of utility companies cited in The Post: simply pull out of the study. This, of course, while simultaneously confounding independent consultants.

To top it off are incendiary contributions from Pepco brass as well. Its senior vice president for strategic initiatives, William M. Gausman, states that Pepco customers "can't afford us to be the best at everything." What an unfortunate remark. Haven't we, your 778,000 customers, paid enough (in many cases over decades) for Pepco not to be dead last?

Scott Cillay, Bethesda

Thank you for the detailed Dec. 5 article on the reliability, or lack thereof, of Pepco's performance. Such an article and study were long overdue.

For more than 20 years, I have felt like a lonely voice in the wind complaining to and about Pepco. I have never understood how the capital of the free world could have the power supply of a developing country.

For years I have contacted Pepco and called in to radio shows when Pepco executives were guests. My complaints fell on deaf ears. Neither a sunny, calm day nor wicked weather has spared my neighborhood and that of others.

Pepco has shown it cares about neither the suburbs nor the suffering of inner-city folk when it comes to power outages and losses of property and food. Bravo to those who are finally listening and informing the public about our utility company.

Mildred Amer, Bethesda

The Post reported acknowledgements by various Pepco officers that their company had performed unsatisfactorily in maintaining service this year and for the past several years. Pepco's chief executive, Joseph M. Rigby, was quoted as observing that his company "has about $8 billion in revenue," but Senior Vice President William M. Gausman remarked, "We're going to be spending more money [to remedy the situation]. . . . Ultimately, people will have to pay for these improvements."