Meet the candidate: Justin Olson, Arizona Corporation Commission
Justin Olson, a former state legislator from Mesa, had some high expectations to live up to when he was appointed to the Arizona Corporation Commission just over a year ago.
He was appointed to the commission by Gov. Doug Ducey after former Commissioner Doug Little resigned to take a job in the U.S. Department of Energy.
Olson said Ducey told him that he was looking for someone who could regulate the state’s utilities, in whom he could be “confident would serve with the highest standards of ethics and integrity.”
Olson was concerned about how high the bar was being set for him, but he eventually accepted the job and is now running for a four-year term.
Though Little didn’t leave under a cloud of suspicion, the Corporation Commission as a whole was.
Commission Chair Susan Bitter Smith resigned in 2015 after conflict-of-interest allegations, and former Commissioner Gary Pierce had been indicted in a federal bribery case tying him to a Pinal County utility in May 2017. The trial ended with a deadlocked jury over the summer, and the charges were dropped.
After Olson was sworn in, he voted with the commission to adopt its firstever code of ethics, and was part of a two-vote minority in favor of a provision barring commissioners from accepting campaign funding or anything else of value from any of the entities it regulates.
The amount of money believed to have been spent on campaigns by the largest of the state utilities, Arizona Public Service, has come under increasing criticism. This year APS is not publicly supporting any commission candidates financially, but has spent about $30 million to lead the campaign against passage of Proposition 127.
But Olson fully agrees with the stance taken by APS and most Republican leaders that a constitutional amendment requiring Arizona to get at least 50 percent of its electricity from solar generation by 2030 would not be affordable or realistic.
He cites the commonly used statistic of California electric rates increasing three times faster than the national average since a similar requirement was adopted there.
“California is actually paying Arizona to take the surplus energy generation off of their grid, because they’ve produced more solar energy than can be consumed. They’ve produced more than that natural limit,” he said.
“It would prove to be disastrous, as it has proved to be in California. It would drive up rates and we would not have the ability to address that concern,” he said.
He says he doesn’t want to downplay the importance of solar power.
“It’s important to point out that I do think solar is an important part of our energy generation portfolio, and it will be a growing part of our energy generation portfolio,” he said.
Olson is interested in one potential avenue to lowering rates, one that has been opposed by APS and other established utilities: a retail power market, which has been enacted in Texas and brought energy costs almost 13 percent lower than Arizona’s, he said.
“So I think this merits an analysis by the commission. We’ve got to look into this and see if that makes sense for ratepayers. If not, then we will only pursue those that are going to be in the best interest of the consumer,” he said.
For retail power, consumers would choose between different providers who would purchase energy from existing power lines in a competitive marketplace.
Before joining the Legislature, Olson worked as a congressional aide to U.S. Rep. Trent Franks and as a tax analyst for the Arizona Tax Research Association.
He said he has always been oriented toward fiscal issues and watching the bottom line.
“Fiscal issues, complex financial documents like the budget, those are the kinds of things I focused on in the Legislature. And those skill sets helped me on the Corporation Commission, because that is the process we have before us,” he said.
Two Corporation Commission seats are on the Nov. 6 ballot. Olson and Republican attorney Rodney Glassman are running as a team against two Democrats, former Commissioner Sandra Kennedy and Kiana Maria Sears, a former commission employee.