Lehigh Valley residents gathered in Harrisburg recently to present a petition opposing a 19.7 percent rate increase for UGI’s natural gas customers.

The petition, signed by over 1,200 concerned citizens, calls on the Public Utilities Commission to deny UGI’s request to pass the $58.6 million cost of replacing outdated bare steel and cast iron distribution lines onto consumers instead of using its profits to provide what should be routine and scheduled maintenance.

The petitions follows:

“We believe that UGI has had decades to take action to make our neighborhoods safer by removing obsolete pipelines through routine and scheduled maintenance.

We believe that any funding to replace this obsolete infrastructure only contributes to additional extraction of fossil fuels at a time when we should be devoting resources to the transition of renewable and sustainable energy resources.

We believe that if UGI has financial resources to expand distribution and service, it should have the financial resources to replace and maintain current distribution and insure current consumer’s safety.

We are calling for the PUC to deny its approval and for UGI to shoulder the cost burden for any replacement infrastructure in compliance with the PUC order.

Furthermore, we are calling on the PUC to make it easier for consumers to transition to renewable and sustainable energy and should not support investments in failed, unsafe and outdated technology.”

Citizens’ concerns include much larger increases for homeowners than for commercial users, investing a billion dollars in the PennEast pipeline instead of replacing aged infrastructure, and advancing new pipeline plans rather than advocating renewable and sustainable energy alternatives.