San Bruno says PG&E too cozy with CPUC’s Mike Florio
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. should be punished for improper back-channel communications with a California Public Utilities Commission member that amounted to a campaign of “constant courting,” San Bruno city attorneys argue in a legal motion filed with the regulatory agency.
More than five years after its gas pipeline exploded in San Bruno, killing eight people, “PG&E still believes that it is above the law and need not play by the rules,” attorneys for the city said in the document submitted to the agency late Tuesday.
Newly released documents show that PG&E executives had meetings, e-mail exchanges and other communications with utilities commission member Mike Florio that were conducted without public notice.
PG&E noted in a statement that the company fired executives last year who engaged in back-channel communications with Florio, and said most of the newly released documents were innocuous.
Sanctions against a utility can include fines or restrictions on its ability to hold such private sessions with commissioners or their staffs.
Florio, a one-time attorney for the customer-advocacy group The Utility Reform Network, apologized last year after PG&E e-mails showed that he had promised a utility vice president that he would try to “bump” an administrative law judge from a $1.3 billion rate-setting case stemming from the 2010 San Bruno disaster.
San Bruno attorneys say a newly obtained batch of e-mails from PG&E shows that the utility’s executives began secretly wooing Florio almost immediately after Gov. Jerry Brown named him to the utilities commission in 2011.
“Florio and PG&E actively participated in improper, illegal and systematic” communications between April 2011 and September 2014, shortly before the judge-shopping e-mails were made public, San Bruno said.
Florio also oversaw the process that determined how much PG&E customers would have to pay to bolster pipeline safety following the disaster.
Florio’s e-mailed suggestion in September 2011 about honoring the workers amounted to “free public relations advice” to the company, San Bruno attorneys argued.
Because the penalty against the company was still pending, they said, it also gave PG&E an opportunity to convince the commission that it had acted in good faith as the disaster unfolded.
Cherry also talked secretly with Florio in February 2013 about who among the agency’s cadre of administrative judges would be able “to help out” in a pending rate case arising out of the San Bruno accident, an internal PG&E e-mail shows.
The 2014 e-mails revealed PG&E’s secret lobbying with Florio and top officials at the agency to get the judge it wanted to oversee the separate, $1.3 billion rate-setting case.