# APSC Staff Testimony on the GAJA Rider The Responsive Testimony and Exhibits of [[Mark Herring]], Public Service Rate Case Analyst II for the [[APSC General Staff]] (Doc. 62, filed 2026-04-14), in [[Entergy Arkansas]]'s [[psc/docket-26-008-tf-2026-05-22/_overview|Docket 26-008-TF]]. It is the Commission Staff's critique of Entergy's $110.4 million [[GAJA Rider 2026 Annual Update]], and it would cut the charge to customers by about a third. ## What's inside Three files: `26-008-TF_62_1.pdf` (Herring's testimony, 19 pp), `26-008-TF_62_2.pdf` (Exhibit MAH-1, the recalculated rate schedules, 9 pp), and `26-008-TF_62_3.pdf` (Exhibit MAH-2, comparison tables, 1 p). ## Staff's principal objection — Ironwood was never designated a "strategic investment" The GAJA rider may recover cost only for an investment the Commission has designated a "strategic investment." Herring testifies that two of Entergy's three projects qualify and one does not. For Jefferson Power Station and Arkansas Cypress, the Commission found each "a strategic investment" and authorized Entergy "to allocate 100 percent of the costs of acquiring and operating" each "to EAL's retail customers as a strategic investment pursuant to Ark. Code Ann. § 23-4-1303(10)" (p. 5). The Ironwood combustion turbine has no such finding: > "Despite the Company's acknowledgement that the purpose of the GAJA Rider is to recover from retail customers EAL's costs associated with strategic investments as defined under Arkansas law and as designated by the Commission, the Commission has not made a finding that Ironwood is a strategic investment nor that EAL has the authority to allocate 100 percent of the costs of Ironwood to retail customers as a strategic investment." (p. 6) Herring attributes the gap to timing: Entergy filed Ironwood's CECPN application on 2024-11-01, before the Generating Arkansas Jobs Act was engrossed (2025-03-11), and "Order No. 9 granting the CECPN for Ironwood did not address whether Ironwood should be designated as a strategic investment" (pp. 6–7). Staff therefore "recommends that the Commission deny 2026 recovery for Ironwood" — though it "would not object" if the Commission designates Ironwood, in this docket or another (p. 9). ## What Staff would cut - **Excluding Ironwood** reduces the revenue requirement by approximately $33.9 million (p. 8). - A **rate-of-return error** — Entergy used the rate of return from a July 2025 evaluation report instead of its December 2025 compliance filing — overstates the requirement by about $463,000 (pp. 11–12). - Combined, Staff's recommended revenue requirement is **$76,085,812**, a reduction of **$34,354,730** from Entergy's filed $110,440,542 (Table 3, pp. 12–13). Excluding Ironwood, Staff calculates the residential bill impact at "$3.97 or a total change of approximately 2.87 percent for a customer using 1,000 kWh per month," against Entergy's proposed $5.77 (p. 14). Either way, Staff finds the rider stays below the statutory rate cap — 9.96¢/kWh against an 11.65¢ cap (pp. 13–14). Like Entergy's filing, Staff's testimony treats the entire cost as recovered from the four standard retail rate classes; it raises no question of whether data-center or other large new-load customers should bear it. ## People and orgs mentioned - [[Mark Herring]] — Public Service Rate Case Analyst II, APSC General Staff; the witness. - [[APSC General Staff]] — the Commission's staff, a party to the docket. - [[Arkansas Public Service Commission]] — the regulator. - [[Matthew R. Morey]] — Entergy witness whose testimony Herring responds to. - [[Entergy Arkansas]] — the applicant utility. ## Concepts invoked - [[Generating Arkansas Jobs Act (GAJA) rider]] — Herring's testimony turns on the statutory "strategic investment" designation requirement. ## Events documented - [[2026-04 APSC Staff and Attorney General Contest the GAJA Rider]]. ## Cross-references - [[GAJA Rider 2026 Annual Update]] — the Entergy filing being contested. - [[Attorney General Testimony on the GAJA Rider]] — the parallel ratepayer-advocate critique. - [[Entergy Rebuttal Testimony on the GAJA Rider]] — Entergy agrees with the $463,000 rate-of-return correction; the Ironwood dispute is answered separately by witness J. David Palmer. ## Role in T002 dialectics This testimony is the **Statement B primary anchor** for [[T002 - Ironwood Strategic Investment Designation Requirement|T002]] and source-of-record for both [[D002 Antithesis]] and [[D004 Antithesis]]. The Herring quotation at p. 6 — "the Commission has not made a finding that Ironwood is a strategic investment nor that EAL has the authority to allocate 100 percent of the costs of Ironwood to retail customers as a strategic investment" — anchors the antithesis's central argument that designation is a discrete adjudicative act, not implicit in any CECPN grant. The dialectic surfaced two pieces of corroborating evidence the prior synthesis hadn't engaged: the comparator orders ([[Cypress Order No. 4 CECPN Approval]] Section F's dedicated Strategic Investment Findings; [[Jefferson Order No. 5 SREA Limited Intervention]]'s "explicitly seeking to establish" language) and the (10)(A) chapeau text pulled from Palmer's own primary source. Per [[D004 Synthesis]], the live disagreement narrows to *minimum content* (what an order must contain to count as designation) rather than *categorical exclusion*. ## Open questions / follow-ups - Whether the Commission ultimately designated Ironwood a strategic investment is decided in a later order — re-check the docket. As of 2026-05-24: Order No. 9 (the CECPN grant) is retrieved and contains no Strategic Investment designation language; the substantive ruling in [[psc/docket-26-008-tf-2026-05-22/_overview|26-008-TF]] on Ironwood inclusion is the dispositive remaining external evidence per the [[D004 Synthesis|D004 verdict]].