As it continues to whitewash the effects of the state’s corrupt HB 6 law, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio routinely strikes expert witness testimony that highlights the law’s corrupt origins or the capture of PUCO’s staff by utility interests.
During the first audit into the effects of the 2019 law that requires Ohio ratepayers to subsidize the operations of two money-losing power plants owned by the Ohio Valley Electric Corp. (OVEC), PUCO staff and the utilities combined to seek to strike testimony that highlighted the law’s corrupt origins and the staff’s willingness to tone down conclusions reached by auditors.
HB 6 was passed after executives of FirstEnergy Corp. led a campaign that raised $61 million to support a dark-money political fund that former Ohio House speaker Larry Householder to push the bill through the state legislature. Householder was convicted of federal corruption charges in 2023 and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.
When utility analyst John Seryak testified in October 2023 that HB 6 was “part and parcel of the corrupt House Bill 6 (HB6), which remains under investigation.” Until all investigations into HB 6 were over, Seryak said, PUCO should not grant any payments to the utilities that share ownership of OVEC.
Lawyers for AEP, AES Ohio and Duke, three of the companies that share ownership of OVEC, moved to strike Seryak’s testimony from the case’s official record. They argued that the validity of HB 6 had to be assumed and therefore criticisms of the law needed to be stricken from the record.
A PUCO administrative law judge agreed, and the full commission followed suit in its Aug. 21 ruling that OVEC’s costs were “reasonable and prudent.”
Perez testimony
The PUCO staff, utilities and the full commission teamed up again to strike the testimony of Joseph Perez, a witness for the Ohio Consumer’s Counsel. Perez wanted to introduce emails between PUCO staff and the auditor, London Economics International (LEI), in which staff members urged the auditor to use a “milder tone and intensity” in a 2019 audit of OVEC plants.
Perez said the emails showed that LEI couldn’t be considered a credible auditor.
PUCO ruled in August that the emails highlighting LEI’s collusion with the company in the 2019 audit weren’t relevant to the current audit, because the emails would create prejudice against the other companies in the case.
A history of collusion
The record of the HB 6 is filled with examples of how the utilities and PUCO staff agreed to limit the release of information that detailed how much money OVEC loses on its coal-fired power plants, the cost of the coal that powers the plants and the names of the fuel suppliers.
Checks & Balances Project reported last year that this information was already available to the public when PUCO agreed to utility claims of trade secrecy and ordered the data redacted from the public version of the audit. Elements of the protective order were removed after C&BP’s reporting showed there was no trade secrecy, because the supposedly secret information had already been released by the U.S. Energy Information Agency or in OVEC’s annual reports.
PUCO staff also allowed officials of utility company AEP to redact parts of an audit into OVEC. Emails about AEP’s ability to redact parts of the LEI audit were at the heart of motion to strike parts of Perez’s testimony.
Ray Locker is the executive director for Checks & Balances Project, an investigative watchdog blog holding government officials, lobbyists, and corporate management accountable to the public. Funding for C&BP is provided by Renew American Prosperity and individual donors.
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