Few state agencies have greater economic impact on Ohio families and businesses than the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, which regulates the rates that electric, gas and other public utilities may charge customers. The panel’s five members, appointed by the governor, serve staggered five-year terms. From among the five appointees, the governor designates one as commission chair.
The PUCO term of the current chair, former Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jenifer French, will expire April 10. The Nominating Council charged with recommending prospective commissioners to Gov. Mike DeWine is now seeking applications for that seat on the commission. Deadline for applying to the 12-member Nominating Council is Jan. 11. The council will meet Jan. 25 to recommend four finalists to DeWine.
DeWine had appointed French to the unexpired PUCO term of former PUCO Chair Samuel Randazzo after Randazzo resigned in November 2020 following the FBI’s search of his Columbus residence.
Randazzo, a DeWine appointee who had been recommended by the Nominating Council, and who was unanimously confirmed by the state Senate, was recently indicted on federal corruption charges for the regulatory favoritism he is alleged to have shown Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp as part of the House Bill 6 scandal. FirstEnergy, which owns the Illuminating, Ohio Edison, and Toledo Edison companies, admitted in a 2021 deferred prosecution agreement paying Randazzo $4.3 million in bribes to do its bidding at the commission and in other ways.
A spokesman confirmed that French will seek reappointment to a full five-year commission term — and there is no reason to believe that she has done anything but an exemplary job after replacing Randazzo on the commission and as its chair.
But the PUCO’s formal launch of its nominating process is a reminder of some key unfinished business at the commission.
One includes the PUCO’s need to complete internal probes that are now on hold at the request of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Cincinnati into possible wrongdoing and regulatory missteps while Randazzo led the commission. Without full clarity on those matters, regulatory reform, both legislatively and administratively, is handicapped.
Our editorial board has repeatedly urged the U.S. attorney to allow the PUCO investigations to go forward. They also bear on ratepayer justice, with Ohio ratepayers still shelling out tens of thousands of dollars a day, according to the Ohio Office of Consumers’ Counsel, to subsidize two money-losing coal plants, one in Indiana, as required by unrepealed parts of the fatally tainted House Bill 6.
But given that the PUCO has been kept from completing its own internal investigations, this new nominating process also highlights the risks for the commission itself when it, too, is proceeding in the dark. As things now stand, commissioners lack full understanding of how the PUCO itself could have become so compromised that, as charged in the Randazzo indictment, a PUCO chair was able to kill internal reports and otherwise manipulate regulatory outcomes.
The other unfinished business has to do with PUCO nominating reform. The latest commission opening is a reminder that the commission’s current nominating mechanism was devised by the General Assembly in 1982 to ward off popular election of the commission and public financing of campaigns, as proposed by a voter-initiated issue on 1982?s statewide Ohio ballot. (The 1982 deal worked. In the end, 67% of voters said “no” to electing the PUCO.)
That 1982 deal is what created the Nominating Council to screen applicants and recommend prospective commission appointees to the governor. But this “above-it-all” set-up has never kept a governor, in the end, from appointing whomever he wanted to the PUCO.
Meanwhile, legislative leaders are sitting on House Bill 363, sponsored by Rep. Daniel Troy, a Willowick Democrat, that would require one of the PUCO commissioners to be a consumer representative selected from a list submitted by the Ohio Office of Consumers’ Counsel, which represents residential ratepayers before the PUCO.
In the near term, a General Assembly that has left swaths of HB 6 on the books is unlikely to make any radical changes in the PUCO nominating pathway. But it’s hardy radical to widen the scope of the Nominating Council’s membership to include a truly diverse set of Ohioans – by occupation and region.
The council as it now exists is an extension of what could be considered the Statehouse Establishment – which has landed Ohio utility consumers where they are today.
