Let’s get some facts straight

Friday, March 31, 2006

Are state legislators playing April Fools’ jokes on us? Are they serious about crucifying one of Maryland’s biggest corporations and trashing a 96-year-old regulatory agency to ensure their re-election? Or is it a negotiating ploy?

It’s getting bizarre. Lawmakers are operating on pure emotion. Self-preservation is driving them to pass wildly punitive bills that could have long-lasting and severe consequences.

The House and Senate may well be violating both the federal and state constitutions in seeking to hold hostage Constellation Energy’s $11 billion merger with FPL Group. Firing the Public Service Commission and replacing commissioners with Democratic allies of legislative leaders makes even less sense if the objective is fair and impartial regulation of utilities. Then there’s the brazen attempt to seize half-billion dollars from Constellation because a law passed in 1999 by the General Assembly turned out to be highly profitable for Constellation but not for the state.

Welcome to the Banana Republic of Maryland, where legislative dictators are blowing up long-established government traditions and using the legislature as a partisan vehicle to strip power from a governor who belongs to the wrong political party.

Don’t like the Republican governor’s appointments to the PSC — even though Democratic legislators approved their nominations? Fire them and give the Democratic House speaker and Democratic Senate president power to appoint a majority to the panel. Politicizing the PSC will put an end to that panel as an independent regulatory arbiter and turn it into a pawn of the Democratic General Assembly.

It’s not the only mess being foisted on the public. Look at the irrational effort to junk $90 million of touch-screen voting machines and spend $50 million on less-reliable optical-scanners.

The House of Delegates passed a bill not only discarding the current high-tech machines — because of allegations the software can be tampered with — but mandating less-accurate voting machines be rented. It did so after receiving promises from a single vendor it could deliver all these machines in time for the September primary.

Now it turns out this vendor has failed to meet delivery deadlines in other states. How come no legislator raised questions about who’s behind this slick deal that seemingly violates every procurement safeguard?

Meanwhile, a Senate panel is mulling a plan to turn Maryland’s elections into 100 percent mail-in votes — an experiment never before tried here and attempted on a statewide level only in Oregon.

Advocates insist on a ‘‘paper trail” for ballots, though the systems under discussion are far more prone to error. They insist on abandoning a system that produced the most accurate vote count in the nation two years ago.

State and local election officials have insisted for months there isn’t time to bring in a brand-new voting system. But that hasn’t fazed lawmakers.

Sensible, practical ideas don’t stand a chance in this legislature. As a result, Maryland’s fall elections could be in serious jeopardy.

Meanwhile, the hottest words are reserved for the electric rate increase crisis. Lawmakers keep trying to ignore reality.

Fact: The Democratic legislature and the Democratic governor approved electric deregulation and a freeze in consumers’ power rates in 1999.

Fact: Agreements implementing that law were approved by the Democratic-appointed members of the PSC and the Democratic-appointed People’s Counsel in 2001 and 2002.

Fact: These are legally binding actions.

One of the few sane voices has been People’s Counsel Patricia Smith, a liberal Democrat whose strong legal credentials led to her appointment by Republican Gov. Bob Ehrlich. She’s been saying things legislators don’t want to hear.

Energy prices will continue to rise, she says. It’s crazy to focus on things the legislature cannot alter. Pepco and Delmarva Power & Light customers were hit with large electric rate hikes starting two years ago when their rate freezes ended. Where was the outrage from lawmakers?

Now those power companies are raising rates 38 and 35 percent, respectively, to reflect the higher cost of power. Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. customers get socked with an unwelcome 72 percent increase this summer because BGE negotiated a longer rate freeze.

All of this flowed from the legislature’s 1999 vote. Lawmakers ‘‘can’t wave a wand,” Smith says. ‘‘There was no parachute built into that law.”

Firing members of the PSC misses the point. Their hands are tied by the 1999 law, too. Appointing new commissioners friendly to legislative Democrats and hostile to electric companies shatters the underpinnings of Maryland’s utility regulatory system.

Smith wants lawmakers to focus on ways to protect customers in the future. She thinks stronger regulation by the PSC is necessary as well as new methods for purchasing power, the re-acquisition of power plants by local utilities and authority for the state to buy its own power plants.

These are intriguing ideas. But Smith, who was hired to be an independent consumer advocate, has been ignored by politicians. Instead, we get political tripe posing as substance.

Fortunately, there’s still time for a moment of clarity. If legislative leaders use their preposterous PSC⁄electric rate proposals as bargaining chips, a workable compromise is possible. If legislators finally heed veteran election officials, a sensible balloting plan could surface. We have not yet reached the point, as Dante might phrase it, where the words over each legislative chamber read, ‘‘Abandon hope ye who enter here.”

Barry Rascovar is a communications consultant in the Baltimore area. His Wednesday morning commentaries can be heard on WYPR, 88.1 FM. His e-mail address is brascovar@ hotmail.com.