The comment came after Cr Niamh Shaw told an extraordinary meeting yesterday that Aurora had applied to the Commerce Commission to have the maximum number of acceptable power outages across Otago altered.
However, speaking to the Otago Daily Times after the meeting, the energy firm countered that claim and stressed it wanted "reliability limits to reflect" ambitions to stabilise the network.
Those would remain similar to the average of the last three years.
The meeting had been called to discuss a letter Mayor Jim Boult planned to send to the Commerce Commission.
The regulator was accepting public submissions ahead of a November decision on a price structuring plan for Aurora Energy.
The power firm, which supplies electricity to Dunedin, Central Otago and the Queenstown Lakes district, had asked for approval to increase prices to fund upgrades to dilapidated infrastructure.
Mr Boult’s letter derided the price hikes at a time of financial difficulty for bill payers and said the infrastructure improvements were not ambitious enough.
Councillors unanimously backed the letter and raised other concerns.
Cr Shaw said she had been made aware of a request by the firm during a public consultation video conference, ahead of the council meeting.
"Aurora has applied to the Commerce Commission [asking] that they relax the limits on unplanned outages over the next three to fours years."
She said she was "really, really unhappy" at the idea limits would be removed just because the company was failing to stay within them.
An Aurora media spokeswoman later said customers were "satisfied" with the service and "unplanned reliability" would stabilise at current levels during the next three years as work was undertaken.
“We have[therefore] asked that reliability limits reflect that."
Earlier this year, there was a furore over the Dunedin City Council and Dunedin City Holdings Ltd-owned Aurora Energy paying out tens of millions in dividends, right before it proposed the price rises.
Cr Shaw suggested historic failures to keep the network to a "basically acceptable standard" needed redressing.
"There seems to be no accountability on Aurora as to how we have ended up in a situation where we have a monopoly that is arguably insolvent and that wants to pass on extensive charges to its customers."
She asked if the council had considered legal action, to which chief executive Mike Theelan said it remained "a live issue for council to pursue".
He said it needed further consideration.
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To be honest, the board at Aurora were just following orders from their owners, Dunedin City Council, creating this mess after handing over their maintenance budgets. It should be the DCC and former councilors who should be facing any legal challenge, and not just from Central Otago.
The City Council is the only shareholder but the company is run by its Board of Directors with the everyday management under the orders of the company's Chief Executive. The DCC staff and elected reps have no input into the running of the council companies. They can write a 'letter of intent' describing what values and priorities they would like the directors to follow but it has no legal force. No wonder council 'controlled' companies throughout NZ have been called 'council-out-of -control companies. The legislation concerning them goes back to the days of Rogernomics and was really the first stage in privatising local government assets. They were certainly taken out of local democratic control. Councillors may be informed about the companies finances and activities but IMO there is considerable difference of opinion about how well that takes place.