The issue of outside influence remains front and center in the race for Arizona Corporation Commission. On Tuesday, the five candidates, who are vying for three open seats on the commission, met for a debate on Arizona PBS hosted by the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission.
The corporation commission’s regulatory powers encompass everything from setting rates for public utilities to designing the state's renewable energy goals. But you’d be forgiven for thinking the commission’s primary responsibility is overseeing elections. The question of "dark money" spending on commission races has dominated this campaign season.
“I’m trying to get to the bottom of the amount of money and the way it was spent in the 2014 election,” Republican commissioner Bob Burns said, who is running for re-election. Burns has led the fight to force Arizona Public Service to reveal whether it was behind $3.2 million in dark money spending to help elect two commissioners during the last election cycle. APS argues this spending is a matter of free speech.
“The constitutional right is to spend it, but not to hide it," Burns said.
APS recently sued Burns after he subpoenaed the company, demanding records of its political spending over the past five years. Burns was in good company at the debate, although mostly with the two Democrats.
“This commission needs to establish a rule that is clear. If you are a government created monopoly, you must reveal every single political contribution, your activity at the legislature,” former state representative Tom Chabin said.
Chabin and his running mate Bill Mundell, who’s a former commissioner now running as a Democrat, have been the most vocal in supporting Burns and in opposing APS. If elected, they are pledging to side with Burns, who needs two other votes in order to force APS’s parent company Pinnacle West to reveal its political spending, according to a recent attorney general’s opinion.
At the debate, Mundell aimed his criticism at Republican and current Commissioner Andy Tobin.
“Andy, you have had two opportunities to support Commissioner Burns. First with the subpoena. You’ve never signed the subpoena,” Mundell said. “Not only did you vote no on the special investigator of APS and the other utilities on spending at the commission, you led the charge.”
That “special investigator” was a lawyer Burns had picked to look into any undue outside influence on the commission, including the issue of dark money spending. The four other commissioners, Tobin among them, shot that down, saying the lawyer had questionable ties to the solar industry.
“I was the one who told Commissioner Burns from the beginning to send a subpoena out,” Commissioner Tobin replied to Mundell.
Tobin said he doesn’t’ necessarily think APS’s parent company must disclose its spending.
“I don’t think that anybody who has any business at the corporation commission, whether regulated or unregulated, should be spending on it,” Tobin said.
All the candidates agreed with that.
Like Tobin, Republican Boyd Dunn was also accused of being soft on the issue by the Democrats. Dunn, a retired judge and former mayor of Chandler, has been the least vocal about his position up till now. At the debate, he said he supported the subpoena and having the courts decide what’s legal.
“I believe we have an opportunity that APS can resolve this issue if they want to and agree that transparency will exist in the future if we seize this opportunity,” Dunn said. “That could become a court order.”
So it is that the 2016 race for corporation commission revolves almost entirely around the election of 2014. In fact, there has not been much significant outside spending on candidates this time around — except for one: a pro-solar independent expenditure committee has spent more than $650,000 so far to support Bob Burns.
