A stealthy move by the Ohio Senate's Republican majority, slipped into its 5,371-page version of the state budget bill, could mean bigger monthly bills for Ohioans who are customers of natural gas utilities.

The proposal would allow, but not require, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to make natural gas ratepayers cover environmental cleanup costs of old "manufactured gas" plants that Ohio utilities own.

In contrast to natural gas, manufactured gas was just that: Utilities heated coal to produce a gas. Households and businesses could use manufactured gas as a fuel, typically in gaslights but in other ways, too.

Manufactured gas is a memory, but environmental hazards from the gas plants remain. Real, too, are the costs to utilities of cleaning up those plant sites. There are perhaps 90 in Ohio. The question is who should pay for cleanups: ratepayers or stockholders.

What seemingly raised the question among utility-friendly Senate Republicans is a pending Public Utilities Commission of Ohio rate case filed by North-Carolina-based Duke Energy Corp., which owns what once was Cincinnati Gas & Electric Co. According to testimony by Bruce J. Weston, the Ohio consumers' counsel, Duke wants to collect $63 million from 420,000 natural gas customers to cover the cost of cleaning up the sites of two former manufactured gas plants in Cincinnati.

One plant last produced gas in 1928; the other in 1963. Ohio has always required, however, that utility rates be based on the value of utility property that's "used and useful" to ratepayers. That description doesn't seem to fit a gas plant last used when John Kennedy was president.

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The Senate Republican amendment would end-run that "used and useful" requirement. It would authorize the PUCO to let gas utilities charge ratepayers for cleanup costs on property that "was used for the provision of public utility service."

Not "is." "Was."

Worse, the amendment would require the PUCO to use a formula that would make residential customers pay the lion's share of cleanup costs -- likely 70 percent-plus, according to several critics.

If that's fair, the gas plant amendment would easily survive House and Senate debate. That Senate Republicans want to bypass debate speaks volumes.