On one hand, Weare Rep. Ross Berry’s bill to fold New Hampshire’s independent Office of the Consumer Advocate into the state Department of Energy has the backing of Republican leadership.

On the other hand, not one of the 15 people who testified on House Bill 610 – including state representatives from both parties, utility companies, nonprofits, members of a related state advisory board and a utility customer – supported it. Two speakers remained neutral: Republican Rep. Michael Vose, who chairs the Science, Technology and Energy Committee, and Chris Elms of the Department of Energy.

Bruce Berk, a Pittsfield resident and Eversource customer, told members of the House Executive Departments & Administration Committee that he was struck by the near-unanimous opposition to the bill.

“I think it’s really unusual … that members from STE, from opposing parties, both believe this is a bad bill,” Berk said at the public hearing on Wednesday. “That should be the bottom line from people who swim in this water all the time, and that’s their judgment.”

Opposition centered around concerns that having the consumer advocate serve at the pleasure of the Department of Energy commissioner could strip it of its independence, which many people viewed as its most important attribute. In online testimony, 368 people opposed the bill and six supported it.

HB 610 would dissolve the Office of the Consumer Advocate, a five-person office tasked with representing the interests of residents and utility customers in government decisions. Created in the 1980s, it operates independently from any other state agency.

Berry seeks to make the consumer advocate an employee of the Department of Energy, arguing that folding a small agency into a larger one would streamline government operations and make it more effective. He wants to give the Office of the Consumer Advocate’s responsibility – which he said he views as lowering residential utility rates, but is statutorily defined as representing the interests of residential utility customers as a whole – to the Department of Energy. Lowering rates should already be a primary goal of the government, he said.

“I don’t want to entirely eliminate the responsibilities,” Berry said at the hearing. “I just think that the much larger, more powerful bureaucracy of DOE should be tasked with this, and this office of five people should be folded into it.”

Berry was unavailable for a follow-up interview.

He also took issue with support for the current consumer advocate, Don Kreis, from a local advocacy group, No Coal No Gas. That group seeks to end the burning of fossil fuels in New England.

“I would venture to you that maybe this office has kind of gotten out of its lane, maybe it’s no longer serving its purpose,” Berry said. “I want to get it back to its original purpose and I think it will be far more effective if it’s rolled into the Department of Energy.”

Kreis told the committee he suspects No Coal No Gas “said nice things about me” because he has spoken out about the lack of accountability surrounding other regional entities that regulate energy.

“I have never supported their aggressive climate agenda,” he said.

The idea to shift the office and its responsibilities started as a way to curb government spending, though Berry acknowledged that simply repealing or transferring the office, which runs on a little more than $1 million per year, wouldn’t make much of a difference. The Office of the Consumer Advocate, like the Department of Energy and the Public Utilities Commission, which regulates electric, natural gas, water and sewer utility rates, is funded by a tax assessment that is added onto utility payments.

Berry said any concern about the consumer advocate losing its independence is “a total falsehood” because of how the position is selected.

The consumer advocate is appointed by the state’s Residential Ratepayers Advisory Board, whose decision is informed by a survey of the public, state employees, utility companies and other stakeholders. Then, the consumer advocate, like all state agency heads, must be nominated by the governor and confirmed by the Executive Council.

This process, as far as Berry is concerned, makes the consumer advocate a politically selected position – therefore, he said, it cannot be ultimately accountable to the public. If faced with conflict, that person could hypothetically bend to the will of any of those nominators in hopes of being reappointed. He’s not alleging that that’s happening, Berry said, although the same could be true for any commissioner, including at the Department of Energy.

“If you’re going to have two political bodies, you might as well have the big one focused on the people,” Berry said.

Others disagreed. While the scope of the position would stay relatively the same – to represent the interests of residential ratepayers – folding the consumer advocate into the Department of Energy could make it easier to remove one who didn’t align with the department’s interests, or for the consumer advocate to be pressured into taking a certain stance.

Kreis, the consumer advocate for the past nine years, is up for reappointment in 2027, though he said he’s considering not running for a fourth term. Though he told lawmakers his office is officially neutral on the bill, he said he believes that the office’s secret to success over the years is its independence.

“While I appreciate that almost everybody who does anything having to do with energy and utilities – whether it’s utilities themselves or executive branch agencies or legislators or other people, everybody professes to love ratepayers – the only organization whose sole concern is the interest of residential utility customers is our organization,” Kreis told the Monitor. “If you took the ... the ratepayer advocacy function, and you folded it into the Department of Energy, the ratepayer advocacy would effectively disappear.”

That’s because, he said, the Department of Energy has to consider more than just residents. It’s also tasked with a much broader scope, weighing the public policy initiatives of the governor, economic development, resource diversity and commercial and industrial energy consumption.

Michael Licata, the director of government relations at Eversource, also noted that the Department of Energy already participates in PUC cases.

“Shifting the consumer advocate under the DOE would give the DOE an oversized role at these proceedings,” Licata said. “Essentially, you would have one state agency with two seats at the table.”

Rep. Mike Harrington, a Strafford Republican, a former PUC commissioner who also served five terms on the Science, Technology and Energy Committee, spoke strongly against the bill, too.

“Getting rid of the OCA, it’s not only silly, it’s not only a solution in search of a problem,” Harrington said. “It is really just bad politics because it’s gonna make us look like we’re taking this pain-in-the-butt problem who speaks up a lot and we hide him under the DOE where we can tell him, ‘Keep quiet. You’re not talking about that issue.’”

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.