PSC has the right to make utility executives salaries public

When the Public Service Commission first proposed the repeal of its rule which mandates the disclosure of utility executives' salaries, commissioners proposing the repeal argued that executives have a constitutional right to privacy and that the PSC has no business being a clearinghouse for information like this.

I disagree with those points, and voted against the repeal of a good, pro-consumer rule at the PSC.

Travis Kavulla

It is obvious that a vast majority of Montanans agree that the PSC should retain its rule to mandate executive compensation disclosure. Commissioners have received a huge amount of formal and informal comments on this matter from members of the public who are upset that public officials charged with safeguarding their interests as utility customers instead seem to be going out of their way to conceal information on behalf of companies whose utility services consumers are forced to buy.

Now, just a couple weeks after loudly defending executives' right to privacy, at least one commissioner is singing a new tune. The note struck in Commissioner Bill Gallagher's recent op-ed is that repealing the rule is nothing more than a harmless cleanup of duplicative language in law.

That is simply not true, and it clouds the issue at hand.

The administrative rule the PSC adopted in 2010 was a clear statement that, as a policy matter, the Commission believes that executive salaries are generally information that must be disclosed to the public.

Mountain Water Company, the public utility serving water to Missoulians, took the PSC to court over our agency's attempt to make that kind of information public. (If the rule was a duplication of something the PSC was already doing and the utility was complying with, the lawsuit would never have been brought.) While the litigation is pending, the information has remained off limits to the public.

About 52 percent of the operations expense of Mountain Water is employee compensation. Hampering our ability to discuss those expenses publicly is detrimental to the public rate-setting process. It would be particularly absurd to conceal Mountain Water executive compensation because its parent company, Park Water, located in California, is subject to a requirement in that state that it must make public salaries in excess of $85,000. In other words, you can know what California employees of the company make, but you can't know what Montana employees of the company make —and won't ever know if the rule is repealed.

Another claim made by Commissioner Gallagher is that the PSC's existing rule is legally flawed. Commissioner Gallagher never explains exactly why, but writes that "Attorneys for the PSC say that based on existing Montana case law the Executive Pay Rule will probably not pass muster." That is false.

Attorneys at the PSC have said unambiguously that they believe the rule could be successfully defended in court. The Commission was told as much at an open work session last month. To quote our staff: "We have reasonable legal arguments in defense of this administrative rule." Moreover, our defense of the rule is being done in-house, with no outside attorneys being paid.

The real risk is that if the PSC caves to utility attorneys, ratepayers may have to pay their costs. The PSC would also be putting itself in the position of having to defend utilities' salary information in the face of lawsuits which seek the release of that information. Mike Meloy, who runs the Freedom of Information Hotline and is the state's foremost public-records expert, has said that attempts to conceal utility salary information would be illegal and could subject the PSC—and thus ratepayers—to having to pay attorneys' fees when courts find that the information should be made public.

State law gives your elected public service commissioners broad authority for the "supervision, regulation, and control" of public utilities. In a state where every single public employee's salary is available through the state government's online checkbook, there is very little legal question that we have the right to possess and make public the salaries of utility executives. It's simply a matter of the political will to do so.

(Travis Kavulla, R-Great Falls, is a Montana public service commissioner. He represents the Hi-Line.)