The editorial page of today’s Whimperer calls for the city of Portland to keep its nose out of Portland General Electric and to leave ratemaking and other regulation to the Public Utility Commission. In the Whimperer‘s view, the PUC is much better suited than the City to supervise how to extricate PGE from Enron, and has demonstrated its ability to regulate the local power companies, which the City hasn’t.
It wasn’t the City, but the PUC, that approved the sale of PGE to Enron in the first place — hardly a triumph of regulation — and then let slide the question of PGE’s phantom income taxes in the rate base. It’s the PUC that should be making up for those mistakes.
I’m reminded (in that farfetched Laquedem way) of a line from The Count of Monte Cristo which the PUC could take to heart. A bandit named Luigi Vampa kidnaps a friend of the Count. The Count goes to Vampa’s lair and asks him to release the friend. Vampa grovels and eloquently begs the Count’s forgiveness. The Count graciously tells him, "You apologize for your mistakes in so gentlemanly a way, that one almost feels obliged to you for having committed them."
It may be too much to expect the PUC to be as aggressive as (say) Eliot Spitzer, but it should at least rise to the standard of apology of Luigi Vampa.
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2 responses
I can’t steal that line without permission.
Would you object if I used the Counts quote in my remarks tomorrow? Of course, with due credit given this time.
Commissioner, I would be delighted if you would.
One gentle note: I usually pronounce my adopted surname with the stress on the first syllable, so it sounds like LOCK-wood-‘m, rather than on the second syllable (“Luh-QUEH-d’m”), as I once heard you pronounce it. It’s a French adaptation of a middle eastern name, and in France it’s pronounced totally differently from both of these.