The neighboring utilities policy is no ground connection in a sealed meter base. They don't want anyone other than the utility to have a reason to be in there.
Fred,
For what it's worth our POCO is the same way here. I don't know what the reasoning is though. I once left a 6" solid tail coming out for other utilities to connect to because service piping was all non-metallic, but was asked (TOLD) to remove it.
Bill