Utility regulators throw out state law
By a 3-2 vote, the PSC voted to:
• Increase the tenure of its chairmanship to two years, instead of the one year set by state law. The trio said the state Constitution allows the move.
• Put a self-described foe of “consumerists” — Stan Wise — in the job for at least two years, starting in July.
• All but guarantee that its best-known consumer watchdog — Robert Baker — won’t get the chairman’s gavel again, by replacing a state-mandated rotation system with one in which the PSC elects its chairman.
The vote may not stand.
“The PSC does not have the power to declare a law unconstitutional,” said Russ Willard, a spokesman for Attorney General Thurbert Baker.
An AG’s opinion is pending, on request from Chuck Eaton, one of the two PSC members who voted against the change. That opinion could throw both the chairmanship issue and the legal validity of future PSC decisions into doubt.
On the surface, the changes appear relatively harmless. Commission chairmen have some power to steer the agency’s actions, but not a lot. Supporters’ stated rationale for the change also seems benign.
“By the time you learn the chairman ropes you have to get off for five years,” PSC Chairman Doug Everett said of the current system.
But the intensity with which Everett, Wise and Commissioner Lauren “Bubba” McDonald pursued the changes have consumer groups on high alert and wondering about the trio’s intentions.
The commissioners tried and failed to get a similar change at the Legislature before mounting their constitutional challenge to the law.
None are lawyers themselves. “You have an undertaker, an insurance salesman and a real estate appraiser thumbing their nose at a statute that’s been on the books for 16 years,” said former Republican commissioner Angela Speir, now with the consumer group Georgia Watch.
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