PSC reinstates Spire's supplemental growth rider and approves Spire's RSA stipulation

The Public Service Commission voted to reinstate Spire Mississippi's Supplemental Growth Rider (SGR) and approved a joint stipulation resolving Spire's annual Rate Stabilization Adjustment (RSA) filing.

Staff explained the SGR, originally approved in 2015, is intended to encourage industrial development by allowing Spire to invest up to $5,000,000 over a three-year term without project-specific commission approval, provided projects meet criteria and staff concurrence. Spire's regulatory planning director, Danny Ford, described a potential 2,100-acre site of interest near Hattiesburg and said typical tap-and-service costs in past estimates ranged from roughly $500,000 (tap examples cited) to $2.2 million'$4.9 million for larger projects, depending on volume and design. Ford said use of the rider would be conditioned on state economic-development approval and staff review; he also described contractual protections such as negotiated-rate agreements with minimum annual-volume provisions and security guarantees (for example letters of credit) to mitigate risk to ratepayers.

On the RSA filing, Spire initially requested approximately $804,000 in additional annual revenue, which staff's review and a joint stipulation reduced to a stipulated revenue requirement of $589,000. Staff said the agreed adjustments reduce the requested increase by 26.7 percent; transcript discussion recorded the resulting average residential-bill increase in staff's presentation as "a dollar 36" (verbatim from the record). Commissioners asked about prior deployments of the rider, to which staff and Spire acknowledged limited prior use and advised the commission that staff oversight would be required before any rider investments are made.

The commission approved both the SGR reinstatement and the RSA stipulation by recorded voice votes on the December docket.