Municipal Utilities Responsible for Profiteering?

The LA Times Michael Hiltzik writes that municipal utilities should pay up the dough they made when electricity prices soared in California during the energy crisis.

There's an ancient principle to the effect that even if you're the unwitting recipient of an undeserved bonanza — say a bank mistakenly funnels a million bucks of someone else's money into your ATM account — you can't keep the money.

Apparently this notion hasn't registered at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. The DWP has so far refused to concede that it should return the estimated $250-million windfall it drained from the pocketbooks of California ratepayers during the energy crisis in 2000 and 2001. That's when sleazy maneuvers by the likes of Enron drove electricity prices up, and innocent municipal generators like DWP pocketed the windfall like everybody else who sold power.

Did I say innocent? A fair amount of evidence suggests that DWP and other munies knowingly joined in this jolly rip-off — all the more reason that they should cough up. (DWP, for its part, has denied that allegation as "sheer speculation.") By keeping the money, of course, the municipal utilities do a favor for their local customers, but only at the expense of everybody else in the state.