For once, regulator calls for lower rates

Pinch me, am I dreaming? An Arizona corporation commissioner is calling on Arizona Public Service to ... cut its rates?

Republican Lea Márquez Peterson wants to see a 25% reduction in what APS customers pay for electricity, bringing the company’s rates more in line with rates charged by utility companies elsewhere.

That thump you just heard? That’s the Pinnacle West Capital Corp. Board of Directors, hitting the marble floor in a dead faint.

I’m guessing the people who run this investor-owned utility have no interest in reducing their rates (and thus, their profits). In fact, APS is awaiting word on whether the commission will allow them to once again raise rates.

In the past, there was no doubt that it would. Regulators were mere puppets on a string, and you know who held the other end.

In 2017, the commission — filled at the time with regulators who enjoyed $14 million in campaign support from APS — rubber stamped a $95 million APS rate hike, one that was sold to us as an average 4.5% rate hike.

Then fully a third of APS customers, about 300,000 customers, saw rate hikes double and even triple that. Then APS was found to have collected more than the $95 million allowed by charging its customers more.

Even so, regulators declined last year to do anything about it. Instead, they ordered APS to file a new rate case, prompting APS to ask for even more of our money.

Now, as we wait for the commission to take up that $169 million rate hike request, along comes Márquez Peterson calling for a rate cut.

APS charges an average of about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour. Márquez Peterson is asking the company to come up with a plan to lower rates to the vicinity of 9 cents per kilowatt-hour.

“Other states that we compete with for jobs and economic opportunities have average retail electric rates around 9, 10, and 11 cents per kilowatthour,” she said in a press release ex

plaining her request. “A well thought out and concerted effort to decrease rates will be absolutely necessary if we’re going to provide a meaningful catalyst for our citizens and economy to take off in the next five to ten years.”

A standing O, if you please, for Commissioner Márquez Peterson, who was appointed by Gov. Doug Ducey to the panel last year and just won election to the job.

And another for Pinnacle West/APS Chairman and CEO Jeff Guldner, if he goes along with Márquez Peterson’s request.

Guldner took over the top job a year ago when Don Brandt abruptly retired, having completed the job of shredding the company’s reputation. Brandt was caught spending $14 million, most of it secretly, on campaigns to get his favored regulators onto the commission in 2014 and 2016. Under his watch, the company’s profits — and our utility bills — soared.

It’s early days but Guldner, thus far, has shown indications of acting in a way that Brandt never did: accountable, that is.

Not only did he pledge to no longer spend millions to stack the commission with regulators of the utility’s choosing, he followed through on that pledge this year. And he has actually appeared before the commission to answer questions about the company’s incompetent handling of that 2017 rate hike, something Brandt rarely deigned to do.

A standing O also is in order for retiring Commissioner Bob Burns, the one regulator who was willing to dig into APS’s cozy connections with the commission, causing copious amounts of indigestion to the puppet regulators all around him.

And to voters, who this year finished the job of replacing the APS-favored regulators with new faces.

Of course, the proof is yet to come but Márquez Peterson’s proposal suggests that the state’s utility regulators, at long last, may be ready to regulate the state’s largest and most powerful utility.

Wouldn’t that be a wondrous thing?