Quick: Can you name the commissioners on the Public Utility Commission of Ohio? Can you even remember how many there are? Or how they got those jobs?
For the record, there are five commissioners, all appointed by Ohio’s governor.
Expecting any Ohioan to recognize their names seems like an obscure extra-credit question for a civics class. (For your next trivia challenge, the commissioners are Sam Randazzo, M. Beth Trombold, Lawrence K. Friedeman, Dennis P. Deters, and Daniel R. Conway).
But what the PUCO does is much more familiar. In recent years what the commission seems to do most often is roll over for the utility industry it is supposed to be regulating. Among the most egregious examples of this is the surcharge the commission allowed FirstEnergy Corp. to tack on Ohio consumers’ electric bills in 2017, which has generated about $150 million a year for the utility company.
Nominally created to provide the company money to modernize the company’s distribution infrastructure, the PUCO neglected to set any conditions for how the company would spend the money. And to no one’s surprise, that is not how FirstEnergy spent it. The Ohio Supreme Court recently ruled that the surcharge is improper, ordering the company to stop collecting it.
And perhaps most appallingly, even though the PUCO failed to set up any conditions on how FirstEnergy would spend the surcharge revenue, state law ensures that FirstEnergy will never be required to refund the consumers’ money.
It is clear the PUCO is not serving its intended purpose of protecting consumers and providing oversight to the state’s utility providers. Maybe, as it has been suggested in recent weeks, the commission would be more responsive to Ohio utility customers and less beholden to the utility companies if its members were elected, not appointed.
Elected PUCO commissioners would have to campaign for office, theoretically meaning they would need to convince voters they would put the state’s best interest ahead of the utility firms. And elected PUCO commissioners who fail at that would risk losing their seat in the next election.
In Ohio we elect judges, whose legal rulings affect everything from our electric-bill surcharges to whether the state’s executions can proceed. We elect the state school board, which sets the standards for what children learn in our public schools. Why not elect the utility oversight agency too?
Electing a public utilities commission may not solve all the regulatory agency’s problems. Utility companies intent on influencing the commission’s decisions could recruit and support friendly candidates, of course. And, like the state board of education, it is likely that campaigns for commissioner seats would not garner much voter attention, making it easy for lackluster candidates to win.
There is no guarantee that an elected commission would be more competent than the appointed commission has been. But there is not much risk that it could be less competent, particularly when Ohio considers the most recent FirstEnergy surcharge debacle.
Ohio’s utility oversight has become a joke. Our electric bills are the punchline. It’s time to consider reforming the commission to allow Ohio voters to elect the people who serve on it.
First Published July 1, 2019, 4:00 a.m.
