Tempers rise over oil-heat lock-ins
— -- Consumers and local governments that locked into long-term contracts for heating fuel and diesel this year to save money as prices soared are feeling buyer's remorse as they watch prices plummet.
"We've never gone through anything like this where prices rise so quickly and fall so quickly," says Dan Gilligan, president of the Petroleum Marketers Association of America.
In Connecticut, more than 500 people have called the attorney general's office in the past two months, trying to get out of the fuel contracts. The national average for home heating oil is $2.41 a gallon. Some paid more than $4 this year.
"It's a universal plea: they want us to extricate them from these contracts," says Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.
He says statewide, about 100,000 of the 680,000 heating oil consumers signed contracts this year.
New Hampshire's attorney general's office received at least a dozen calls and the Vermont AG's office about two dozen from upset homeowners.
Of the 8 million households that use home heating oil in the USA, 6.2 million are in the northeast, according to federal data. No one tracks how many consumers nationwide enter into fuel contracts.
There is little relief available, unless the contract doesn't comply with a state's regulations, says Lauren Noether, senior assistant attorney general for New Hampshire and chief of the Bureau for Consumer Protection.
Elsewhere:
•The Penn Hills school district, in suburban Pittsburgh, joined a consortium of 72 districts that signed a contract in April for diesel at $4.21 a gallon.
Richard Liberto, director of business affairs, estimates that the contract, which runs through the school year, costs the district $15,000 more a month compared with what it could be paying today.
The national retail average for diesel is $2.33 a gallon.
•The Denver Regional Transit Authority locked into a fuel contract in April for $3.20 a gallon through December, says spokesman Scott Reed. Today, diesel averages $2.25 in the region.
