BAD ENERGY: California lawmakers love to talk smack about the state’s power company regulator. Last month, 67 of them turned that talk into votes.
ACA 9, Assemblymember Tasha Boerner’s ballot measure proposal to radically reshape the California Public Utilities Commission, passed the Assembly with an overwhelming majority. That included an “aye” from Speaker Robert Rivas.
“It’s a rallying cry for change,” Boerner said. “Everybody knows the CPUC has to do better.”
In interviews with eight other lawmakers who work on energy issues, POLITICO found that key decision makers in the Capitol have grown exasperated with the agency and want to see some major shifts.
Had the measure made it across the finish line, it would have added four Legislature-appointed commissioners to the CPUC, a regulatory body that oversees the state’s power, telecommunications, water and rail companies. It would have also empowered lawmakers to strip the agency of its authority to regulate telecoms firms.
In the end, Boerner decided to hold her bill, she said, as the clock was running out on the June 25 deadline to pass measures to qualify for the November ballot. The bill had run into stiff opposition in the Senate from labor groups, utilities, energy developers and consumer advocates who were concerned that the restructuring could weaken the regulatory body and disrupt its work.
“We needed more time to work with different stakeholders in order to get the clearest, best consumer protection measure to the people,” Boerner said. She hopes to introduce a new version that will land on the spring 2028 ballot.
But even with ACA 9 off this legislative session’s game board, the fact that it passed the Assembly is still reverberating through energy policy circles. It illustrates that the all-too-common barbs thrown at the CPUC during legislative hearings aren’t just bluster, but a real desire for reform.
“That degree of frustration, or even anger, is a result of these soaring electricity rates across the state,” Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, who chairs the Utilities and Energy Committee, said. “[There’s] a sense from both the public and the legislature that the PUC’s not doing everything they can to bring costs down,” she continued, though she believes that some of that criticism is “unfair.”
Nonetheless, Petrie-Norris intends to make the case to the next governor that “we do need to see some PUC reform.” She believes that the agency has expanded well beyond its core responsibility to set rules and rates for utilities, as specified in the state constitution, and now devotes too much energy to a wide set of programs that would be better suited for the California Energy Commission, another energy policy agency that has traditionally been a major funder of innovative projects, to manage.
When POLITICO asked CPUC President John Reynolds why the agency’s relationship with the legislature had become rocky enough to spur the Assembly to pass ACA 9, he pushed back on that framing.
“I probably wouldn’t describe it as rocky … we’ve had lots of constructive discussions with the legislature on legislation, including lots of legislation that has passed and we have implemented,” Reynolds said.
However, he alluded to a series of scandals that unfolded a decade ago when there was widespread media coverage of emails between Pacific Gas & Electric executives and CPUC leadership that illustrated a cozy relationship, spurring a wave of legislative reform efforts.
“We had a very real breach of trust with the legislature and with the public, and I think those sorts of problems take a lot of time to heal,” Reynolds said.
But the legislators who POLITICO spoke with were focused on stonewalling, not backroom deals.
“We feel that they don’t really listen, they don’t necessarily implement legislative priorities, and from our perspective, they pick and choose which policies to implement in a time-efficient manner,” Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin said in an interview.
That’s a common complaint in the halls of the Capitol. Assemblymember Chris Ward has sounded a similar note as he pushes to pass AB 1813, a community solar bill. Ward says he’s been forced to take action after the CPUC adopted a program that, in his view, isn’t viable.
“[I’m] probably not the only person in this room that gets royally frustrated by a state agency or city entity that is overly-bureaucratic and is … missing the mark on its responsibilities to be able to deliver on what the legislature is asking to do, which is actually to have something workable,” Ward said last week while presenting his bill to the Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee.
POLITICO sent the CPUC a detailed list of lawmakers’ complaints. The agency chose not to comment by press time. But a CPUC staffer, granted anonymity to speak candidly, pushed back on the notion that the regulator eschews legislative directions.
“There’s a lot of stuff that the legislature passes, and some of them end up taking a tremendous amount of work to implement,” the staffer said. “We are energy experts, we’re meant to be experts in the grid and how rate setting works, so some of our concerns on these programs are coming from a place of expertise … but I think we don’t do the best job of communicating that externally.”
Some lawmakers do recognize that tension, like Sen. Josh Becker, who said he occasionally is frustrated by the agency’s pace.
“But sometimes they’re also hamstrung by some of the accountability measures we put in, in terms of their own internal operations, and sometimes they are going to get to the right answer on their own, without intervention from the legislature,” Becker said. “There’s probably legitimate concerns about too much legislative direction.” — NB