Three Federal Hill women spent roughly 20 hours in a Baltimore City detention center in June 2023. Their offense? Standing on a public street, objecting to Baltimore Gas and Electric’s (BGE) crews drilling new external gas regulators into the historic marble facades of their own homes.
They weren’t behind on their bills. They weren’t breaking the law. According to a lawsuit filed last week, they were arrested because BGE wanted them out of their way and allegedly lied to Baltimore police to make that happen. The complaint alleges BGE pushes police intervention rather than addressing residents’ concerns, turning a disagreement between a utility and its
customers into a matter for handcuffs and a jail cell.
The suit, filed by attorney Thiru Vignarajah, is troubling. BGE told officers it had given residents the legally required notice before beginning work. According to neighbors, it hadn’t. They got a few hours’ warning, not the 14 days the law demands. BGE told police it held a valid permit, but according to the complaint, that permit covered a different block, a different scope of work, and a different time of day. BGE told officers it had tariff authority to shut off gas service to any customer who refused the new regulators. The Maryland Public Service Commission later concluded no such authority exists.
Body camera footage cited in the lawsuit reportedly shows officers being visibly uncomfortable while enforcing a private company’s construction schedule. They arrested the women anyway. One woman, Claudia Towles, was in the middle of launching a City Council campaign. She
watched her own kickoff party unfold from Central Booking because her husband couldn’t get her out in time.
Vignarajah’s lawsuit doesn’t target the police. It targets BGE, arguing the utility instigated a false arrest by feeding officers a story it knew wasn’t true. Since 1995, Maryland law has said that if a private individual or company fabricates the facts that lead to an arrest, that person or company
can be held legally responsible for false imprisonment.
If the allegations hold up, Marylanders should ask what this episode says about BGE’s relationship with its customers. When residents raised questions about work being performed on their homes, the response wasn’t transparency or engagement. According to the lawsuit, it was arrest. That is the kind of conduct customers might expect from a monopoly utility more focused on compliance with the public than accountability to the public.
BGE’s hard line toward critics might be easier to defend if the company showed the same diligence with its own infrastructure. It does not.
The day after the Federal Hill lawsuit made headlines, a longtime BGE employee gave sworn testimony to the PSC describing something far more alarming than one bad afternoon. They swore BGE had systemic inspection failures, contractors grading their own work, and understaffing that has raised the risk of gas and electrical fires and explosions across three
Maryland counties. That testimony builds on findings state regulators have already confirmed: that a BGE inspector falsified gas pipeline records, skipped required field checks for years while collecting a paycheck, and that BGE’s own quality-assurance process failed to catch it or reinspect the affected work. Fourteen former employees have told the PSC the company’s
leadership knew about the problems and still did nothing. One home explosion in Bel Air in August 2024 killed both a contractor and a homeowner, the kind of tragedy that inspections exist to prevent.
Meanwhile, customers are paying more than ever. BGE’s gas delivery rates have roughly tripled since 2010, and electric rates have doubled over the same period, with another 7 to 9 percent increase landing since January of last year. Families across the region now carry utility bills approaching $900 a month for a service they cannot shop around for, from a company whose
parent, Exelon, carries a market value worth about $40 billion.
Maryland ratepayers have no alternative supplier to switch to when a monopoly utility treats their objections as a police matter and treats its own safety inspections as optional. The Public Service Commission and the General Assembly must hold BGE accountable on behalf of customers. Regulators should widen the current inspection investigation to cover BGE’s full gas construction program, not just the years and categories BGE would prefer. Lawmakers should ask hard questions about a rate structure that lets a company pass the cost of its own oversight failures to the same customers it’s had arrested for asking questions.
BGE doesn’t get to decide when Marylanders are silenced and handcuffed. That decision belongs to regulators who answer to ratepayers, not to a utility that answers to shareholders.
