Courtesy Public Service Commission of Wisconsin
From left: Rebecca Valcq, Tyler Huebner, and Summer Strand.
Summer Strand, right, will replace retiring Rebecca Valcq as PSC chair. Meanwhile, the state Senate rejected the nomination of Tyler Huebner, who has been on the job for three years.
As a rule, I think Gov. Tony Evers has made good and, in some cases, excellent appointments to fill out his administration. But he has had a blind spot at the Public Service Commission where he has appointed three commissioners with pro-utility conflicts of interest.
Now, it appears he’ll have two chances to do better.
Last week PSC Chair Rebecca Valcq announced her resignation. Valcq, a utility regulation lawyer, had a long career representing Wisconsin's largest utility, WE Energies, before being appointed by Evers to regulate that utility among others. She hasn’t said what she’ll do next, but I’ll bet that she will return to the other side of the table, armed with even deeper knowledge about how to game the system for her client.
To be fair to Valcq, she generally did a good job in her role and she was fair to utility customers. The Citizens Utility Board had positive things to say about the PSC’s decisions in recent rate cases. But I would argue that she gave her former employer the big win they really wanted when she voted to approve the massive Cardinal-Hickory Creek power line in her first year on the commission. That line is a project of ATC and the majority shareholder in ATC is WE. ATC is guaranteed a tidy profit on the line.
In addition to Valcq there may soon be a second opening on the three-member commission. Also last week a Senate committee recommended rejection of Evers’ nomination of Tyler Huebner. If that recommendation is followed by the full Senate, Huebner would essentially be fired from a job he's held for three years.
Huebner also has a glaring conflict of interest, having lobbied in favor of that Cardinal-Hickory Creek line on the grounds that it would bring in wind energy from the West. Huebner had been executive director of RENEW, a pro-wind and solar nonprofit. But that's not why the Republicans on the committee voted against him. One of the members said that Huebner didn't have an "all of the above" approach to energy, meaning he favored alternatives over fossil fuels. That's not a sufficient reason to fire him. That view simply reflects the policy choice of the governor who appointed him.
Ironically, the Republicans confirmed Valcq, who had the most obvious and far-reaching conflict of all while they may reject Huebner, whose conflict was limited to the power line, which he never actually voted on since the commission had approved it before he was appointed.
It used to be common practice for the Senate to approve a governor’s nominees so long as they were qualified. But these Senate Republicans have decided they can reject nominees simply because they don’t like their policy preferences, which of course, only reflect those of the governor who was elected by a majority of Wisconsinites.
Evers has now elevated his remaining and most recent appointment, Summer Strand, to replace Valcq as chair. Strand has her own conflicts as her previous job was with a national engineering firm that, among other things, worked on utility projects.
But the governor will have at least one, and more likely two, chances to make better appointments. He could try to balance his pro-utility appointments with a pro-ratepayer commissioner. Tom Content, who runs CUB, would be an excellent choice. But of course, Content would be quickly rejected by Senate Republicans because, while it’s okay in their view to have a pro-utility bias, it would be outrageous for an appointee to come from a ratepayer orientation.
So, let me again dust off a recurring idea: appoint retired judges. Sure, the issues are complicated and technical, but any reasonably intelligent person can figure that stuff out, and the PSC has excellent staff to help with that. What’s really needed are the skills of a jurist. The PSC is a quasi-judicial agency. Its job is to evaluate evidence in light of policies and laws and then come to a fair decision that balances the interests of utility investors and consumers. While I don’t think that Valcq or Huebner necessarily did a terrible job in that regard, it was unnecessary to appoint people with such obvious conflicts. They may be fine people, but, especially in Valcq’s case, their backgrounds taint their every decision.
Why Evers, an honest guy who is doing a good job running state government, has found it necessary to make appointments to the PSC that had such obvious conflicts, when he has plenty of much better alternatives, has been a mystery to me. But now he has a chance to make a fresh start.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
