A House Labor, Commerce and Industry subcommittee this week
approved a bill that grants four of the 11 Santee Cooper board seats
to the state-owned utility's biggest customers: the state's electric
cooperatives. Like a majority of S.C. senators, who passed the bill
last month, subcommittee members see this as an improvement over the
original legislation.
The original proposal to wrest control of Santee Cooper from Gov.
Mark Sanford would have given the co-ops six board members - a
majority. Legislators now apparently think the bill will seem less
threatening to South Carolinians if co-ops have only strong minority
representation on the board.
They're wrong. Under the current version of the bill, co-op
representatives would need only to co-opt two other board members to
leverage favorable wholesale power prices for the co-ops, while
reaching deeper into the pockets of Santee Cooper ratepayers to
cover the cost. This prospectively could be bad news for S.C.
communities such as ours, where most residential, commercial and
industrial customers buy electricity from Santee Cooper at
retail.
Co-ops are neither inherently evil or inherently good. Like
Santee Cooper itself, they exist to make electricity available in
the parts of the state, especially rural areas and small towns,
where for-profit utilities didn't initially choose to invest.
But current law strikes a reasonable balance of (political) power
between the mother utility, Santee Cooper, and the co-ops, which do
have one dedicated seat on the board. Whoever happens to be S.C.
governor nominates the best people available across the state,
proportional to the state's congressional districts and subject to
Senate consent.
The "reform" bill not only would give the co-ops undue influence
on the board but also would restrict the governor's board choices to
a pre-screened list put together by a legislatively appointed panel.
The Senate would retain its right to consent to board choices.
Legislators apparently would allow the governor to retain a
minimal role so that casual observers wouldn't see the bill as a
legislative hijacking of Santee Cooper. But it is.
The lead legislators on this issue, including Sen. Luke Rankin,
R-Myrtle Beach, ventured in this thicket because Sanford had the
temerity to suggest that Santee Cooper should be more efficient and
deliver a greater cash return to the state. Sanford's firing of
several board members whose performance on reform issues was not to
his liking fueled the urgency for change, as did his clumsiness in
handling questions about whether he intended to propose that the
utility be sold.
Legislators might be on solid ground enacting one provision of
the bill, which would restrict the governor's power to remove Santee
Cooper board members. In the hands of a governor less scrupulous
than Sanford, this at-will removal power could make a political
football of the utility.
But the main bill remains fatally flawed. Legislators depict the
measure as a move toward greater Santee Cooper accountability to
S.C. voters. But as the Charleston Post & Courier pointed out
editorially last week, the bill would actually reduce
accountability. Senators, who would gain control over the utility,
answer only to voters in their districts.
The governor answers to all S.C. voters. That, especially, is why
an outbreak of reason on Santee Cooper is overdue in the Statehouse.
If legislators allow ire with Sanford to impel them to make a
terrible mistake, they'll end up regretting it.
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