Davis Merritt: Will utility watchdog become a lapdog?

Gov. Sam Brownback’s four remaining appointees to the Citizens’ Utility Ratepayer Board are anxious for you to know that they have no intention of abandoning the agency’s watchdog role.

That is, until they do.

For 27 years, CURB has given average citizens and small businesses a protective seat at the table for the high-stakes, legally complex process of adjusting rates and other dynamics of the state’s regulated utilities. It was initiated by the Kansas Corporation Commission in 1988 and then formalized by the 1989 Legislature.

Since then, CURB has intervened in scores of rate cases and saved Kansans hundreds of millions by moderating the energy industry’s profit ambitions.

The past two weeks, however, have been distressing. On Dec. 11, the board discussed possible changes in its focus. Member James Mullin II suggested that CURB could focus less on oversight and more on thwarting the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to clean up the nation’s power grid. That, he said, drives utility rate increases, not utility profit margins. He even pointed out, without apparent irony or discomfort, that such a change would make CURB partners with the utilities, the very companies it was created to keep in check.

In addition to Mullin’s speculation, member Bob Hall opined that the idea of climate change driven by human activity is a “fraud” – that humans cannot produce enough carbon dioxide to justify switching to cleaner energy. And member Ellen Janoski expressed concern that her patron Brownback would be blamed for future utility rate increases and, therefore, CURB’s resources should be used to educate the public that the EPA is the problem, not Brownback or utility profits.

The board also voted to restrict acting consumer counsel Niki Christopher from the traditional counsel roles of fielding media inquiries or representing consumers before legislative committees; the board would handle those tasks from now on.

Eagle reporter Dion Lefler covered, recorded and reported on the session. Then-Chairman Brian Weber participated by teleconference. A transcript will be available later. So there’s little question about the nature of the discussion, right?

Nope, not right.

Last Thursday, the remaining board members held a teleconference meeting to, among other things, elect Janoski as the new chairwoman. But they spent almost half the session in revisionist mode complaining about Lefler or, as Mullin put it, “that little guy from Wichita journalism or whatever.”

Mullin claimed that the considerable public outcry after the Dec. 11 meeting resulted not from his expressed interest in change but from Lefler’s reporting of it. Janoski protested that Mullin’s comments were merely “a couple hypothetical sentences” in a very long meeting. Other members argued that the discussions about the agency’s role were “hypothetical.”

That being the case, one might reasonably ask why Weber abruptly resigned last week and why acting counsel Christopher told the board that she could not “legally or ethically” represent it if those supposedly hypothetical changes occurred.

In Ray Bradbury’s chilling 1953 novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” the dictatorship’s firemen have been repurposed: Their new assignment is to burn books.

In Kansas in 2015, will the CURB watchdog be repurposed as the energy industry lapdog?

Don’t bet against it, because raw ideology now rules every aspect of Kansas government.

This story was originally published December 21, 2015 at 6:05 PM with the headline "Davis Merritt: Will utility watchdog become a lapdog?."