By Count Friedrich von Olsen
I have been told, by an extremely well-placed individual, that the most recent effort to legislate reform with how California’s hopelessly corrupt Public Utilities Commission does business failed because our equally hopelessly corrupt governor threatened to veto any meaningful reform legislation that would be passed. Since no legislation was actually passed and these supposed veto threats occurred on the QT behind closed doors, no one, and that includes me, is in a position to prove anything. What is well known, however, is that last year, when a raft of reform bills was passed and placed on his desk, Governor Jerry Brown vetoed them all. His justification? They were contradictory and unworkable, he said…
It was fairly obvious that he was trying to avoid bringing the house of cards down upon himself and so, earlier this year, he made it appear as if he was ready to seriously entertain signing off on a reform package the legislature might deign to put together this summer. This came in the aftermath of the Assembly’s passage by an overwhelming margin, in June, of a constitutional amendment to denude the utilities commission of a significant degree of its authority. The Assembly was set to layer into the mix the authorization of an independent internal auditor to review commission decisions. Another safeguard the Assembly wanted was the prohibition of former utility executives from leaving employment with a utility and jumping immediately onto the commission. The reform would have made them wait at least two years to do that. Those reforms were supposed to be placed into Senate Bill 1017 and Assembly Bill 2903. And the new law would have made it a misdemeanor for utilities commission employees or board members to release to anyone – including competing utility companies or their parent companies or their lawyers or their investors or their stockholders – information deemed confidential or proprietary by utility companies. But, it turns out, some of the current members of the commission didn’t like those proposed changes…
What I am told is Governor Brown let it be known, quietly, he was ready to use his veto power again on these laws. Supposedly, this veto threat was justified by the assertion that the new law might be in conflict with California Public Records Act provisions that require release of documents when they are requested. To me this seems a stretch because if things are confidential, they are immune from the Act…
There has been an ongoing criminal investigation into the California Public Utilities Commission for almost two years now over some of the commission members’ backchannel dealings with utility executives. Someone is protecting these miscreants, it seems…
Some food for thought: Our governor may not want people mucking around too deeply into issues involving utilities and energy policy in the Golden State and how licensing of energy projects is carried out. I also have it on the highest authority that last year our governor used his executive power to extract from California’s oil regulating agency maps, geologic surveys and records relating to oil and natural gas reserves beneath his family’s 2,700-acre ranch in Colusa County…