When we left Arkansas's intrepid utility regulators in June they were facing their first test with Arkansas's brave new utility rate reform law, which seeks to guarantee utilities higher rates for their electricity and gas but to soften the effect on big industries that use lots of power by shifting their costs to homeowners and small businesses.

Let's see how things are going down in Entergy Arkansas's request for $167 million in new revenues and regular annual increases thereafter. All the stakeholders in the case have shown their hands in a thousand pages of testimony at the Public Service Commission, which will render its decision late this winter.

You may remember that Act 725, obviously designed by Entergy, slid through the legislature last spring with virtually no stir or debate. It sharply overhauls the way the state has regulated rate increases by utilities since the 1930s. Utility rates once were big issues, and a politician's fortunes — let's mention Jim Guy Tucker, Bill Clinton, Frank White and the much earlier Francis Cherry — rose and fell on how they handled big utility issues like the Grand Gulf nuclear project in Mississippi that hit everybody's pocketbook. Not so much anymore.

It may be unfair to say that Act 725, which favors utilities and the big industries that consume vast amounts of gas and electricity, is a product of the sudden domination of the legislature by the Republican Party, but it surely helped. The law's sponsor, though not its author, is Rep. Charlie Collins, Republican of Fayetteville, who is on the House Insurance and Commerce Committee, which handles utility legislation.