April 2025, Vol. 252, No. 4
Editor's Notebook
Showing the Show-Me State
By Michael Reed, Editor-in-Chief
(P&GJ) — With little fanfare, PHMSA recently took over regulating Missouri’s natural gas pipelines, saying the state had failed to issue adequate penalties for safety standard violations.
While on its face this appears fairly heavy-handed, it is not like Missouri lawmakers had not been warned that non-compliance — in this case, years of it — could constitute grounds for such an action.
RELATED: Missouri Loses Control Over 1.5 Million-Mile Gas Pipeline Network as Feds Step In
Federal law requires regulators to issue fines of between $272,000 and $2.7 million per violation where gas pipelines are concerned. However, based on public records, Missouri had meted out only a fraction of those penalties, at a rate of between $20,000 and $200,000.
Additionally, according to the state’s own Public Service Commission (PSC), which oversees between 100 and 150 inspections each year to look for corrosion, leaks and other hazards, no penalties at all were issued in 2023, despite the fact that 74 violations were found.
In response to the federal action, the PSC said it prioritizes fixing violations over the issuance of fines and, as we all know, repairs cost money.
“Your [companies with violations] ability to return to compliance quickly, in a timely manner, is our number one priority,” Rich Germinder, state Public Service Commission senior policy adviser, told the Missouri Independent. “We are not driven to issue fines or penalties as a matter of first resort. It’s a matter of last resort.”
Nonetheless, it seems the Show-Me State, in this instance, really needed to be shown. In fairness though, it wasn’t like no one had taken a stab at tackling the problem, which seems fairly simple to fix. In Missouri, state laws on maximum fines of this type do not align with the minimum levels prescribed by federal requirements.
State Sen. Mike Cierpiot, a Republican from Lee’s Summit, near Kansas City, had tried to change the discrepancy repeatedly, offering legislation to increase the fines for running afoul of pipeline safety standards on more than one occasion. His efforts, unfortunately, fell short, usually due to political gridlock.
His most recent effort died primarily because it ended up being attached to a bill concerning the lawmakers’ far-from-amiable arguments over broader utility reforms. Among those is the controversial “future test year” policy, which would permit utilities to set prices based on projected expenses, rather than incurred costs.
“The last three or four years has been kind of a tough thing to get bills through the Senate — and so utility bills, as most things, have got clogged up at the end,” he told St. Louis’ NPR station, KDHX. “It’s just been caught up, as many things have been caught up lately, just because of the dysfunction of the Senate.”
Cierpiot’s legislation contained an emergency clause that would have allowed it to go into effect immediately after the governor signed it.
This non-business-as-usual response from legislators comes with a cost to Missouri residents, too. With PHMSA calling the shots now, the state no longer controls how the fine money would be distributed; in other words, the local schools that are located where the violations occurred lose out to the federal treasury going forward.
Missouri encompasses more than 1.5 million miles of natural gas pipelines, according to PHMSA. Meanwhile, U.S. Census Bureau records show gas is used to heat 50% of homes in Missouri.
“The feds basically had given us an opportunity to make the corrections and make the changes over time, and offered some leniency toward our noncompliance,” Germinder added. “Eventually, the feds just believe that it had been too long.”
At our deadline, the gas safety standards bill had passed out of committee and was waiting on a vote by the Missouri Senate.
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