When will regulators demand answers?

Stephanie Pullman’s death was a horrible tragedy and a fundamental failure of both Arizona Public Service and the Arizona Corporation Commission that (theoretically) regulates utilities.

But it wasn’t the first tragedy or the first failure.

Turns out Pullman was the second woman to die last summer after APS cut off her power because she couldn’t pay her bill.

APS on Wednesday admitted that another customer was found dead in her apartment in July 2018 after her electricity was cut in June.

So what, you might ask, did APS do in light of a dead customer lying there in a hotbox of an apartment?

Did APS reconsider whether it should slow down on pulling the plug on struggling customers during the first summer after a rate increase?

Did APS report the July death to state regulators so they could consider whether action was warranted to protect people?

Did the state’s largest and wealthiest utility do anything to protect lowincome customers to ensure that no one would die due to an inability to pay the power bill?

It doesn’t seem so.

Instead, APS quietly settled with the woman’s estate though it disputes any connection between her loss of electricity and her loss of life.

Two months later, a second woman, Stephanie Pullman, was dead.

It would take another one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, NINE months for anyone over at the Corporation Commission to start asking questions.

And this, only because the Phoenix

New Times told the story of Pullman’s death after she came up $51 short on an overdue APS bill. The 72-year-old Sun City woman had heart disease but the medical examiner ruled that heat exposure contributed to her death.

After Pullman’s story became public, the Corporation Commission quickly moved to bar regulated utilities from cutting customers’ electricity from June 1 through Oct. 15.

It was a good move, the only move. But here’s what the commission hasn’t done.

It hasn’t demanded that APS CEO Don Brandt appear before the commission to publicly explain what happened here.

To explain why APS cut the power two days after Pullman paid $125 toward her $176.84 delinquent account. Or how having a third-party contract hang a notice on her door a door fulfilled a state rule requiring “a personal visit to the premises by an authorized representative of the utility” before pulling the plug on a customer.

To explain what APS did after learning that Pullman died. Or just how

many customers were cut off because the 2017 rate increase left them unable to pay their bill.

Speaking of things the commission hasn’t done …

It hasn’t held anyone on the staff accountable for failing to do, well, anything after learning of Pullman’s death last September.

Naturally, the staff investigated itself and cleared itself of any wrongdoing.

But how about asking Utilities Director Elijah Abinah why the staff ’s response was to do nothing after learning that an APS customer died after her power was cut?

Or asking why the staff suddenly decided to no longer require utilities to report the number of times they disconnected customers in 2018. And whether that decision had anything to do with APS disconnecting power 110,029 times last year – a 50 percent boost over the average of the previous five years.

We don’t yet know anything about the customer who died two months before Pullman, only what APS laid out in its Wednesday disclosure.

I’d like to say we can rely on state regulators to get to the bottom of things but …