“How many people have gone to the Corporation Commission?”
Three people raised their hands in the small classroom at First Church UCC Phoenix.
“I don’t blame you,” said Sandy Bahr, director of the Arizona chapter of the Sierra Club.
Tuesday, Bahr spoke to a group of about 15 community members at an informational meeting hosted by the Arizona Poor People’s Campaign. The group borrows its name from Martin Luther King Jr.’s short-lived anti-poverty movement of 1968.
The Poor People’s Campaign is focused on social, economic and environmental justice, and sometimes this takes the form of educational meetings on dry topics like the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC).
The ACC is a five-member regulatory body of the state’s public utilities like APS and TPT, and the commission has the last word in almost everything utility companies do, including prices and rate hikes.
Bahr pointed out that with all its powers, the commission remains fairly inaccessible to ordinary citizens, especially the working class.
The commission meets for two consecutive days per month, usually in the mid-morning when many people are at work or school.
In addition, Bahr believes the website is not easy to navigate, e-dockets are confusing and even the doors to the front of the building are not accessible–the only entrance is behind the building.
The point of the meeting: to get into the nuts and bolts of civic engagement with the ACC such as how to contact a commissioner, how to read a docket number, and exactly how many letters a citizen must submit to have their item included on the agenda (hint: the magic number is 14 copies).
The gathering was intended to make the ACC more accessible to regular Arizonans.
“The people don’t immediately know what [the ACC] does and what the process is,” said Ramon Aquino, a longtime local activist and member of the Poor People’s Campaign.
Buying their regulators
The commission has been dogged for years with suspicions of ACC candidates accepting dark money contributions from APS, Arizona’s largest electric company, a claim APS repeatedly dodged.
This week, the Arizona Republic reported on a subpoena ordered by three commission members which confirmed that APS spent upwards of $10 million in dark money contributions to elect two of its own regulators, Tom Forese and Doug Little, to the Corporation Commission back in 2014.
The two commissioners have since departed, but not before an 11% average increase in APS users’ electric bills in 2018.
“The commission is supposed to be the watchdog,” said Bahr. “It’s such a direct conflict … they should not be able to spend money on people who regulate them.”
“I need to survive first”
Masavi Perea, a member of Chispa, a Latino environmental justice group, brought up a point that seemed to sum up the entire evening. Issues of clean energy and climate justice take a back seat when people in poverty cannot afford electricity.
When Perea would bring these lofty issues to the community, the response was, “That’s interesting, but I need to survive first.”
He had heard of countless people unable to afford their electric bill and even mothers who would regularly shut off their AC while their children were at school, and turn it back on when the kids returned home.
Those present strongly supported what they consider more environment-friendly energy options, especially solar energy.
“We live in the Valley of the Sun … so how come we don’t have solar electricity,” Perea said at the meeting.
Last November, Prop. 127, a ballot measure which would have required Arizona to acquire 50 percent of its energy from renewable resources by 2030, was defeated.
Redeem Robinson, a reverend at the UCC Phoenix, echoed the economic hardships many Arizonans face in paying for utilities.
“The issues that pop up at the Arizona Corporation Commission actually affects the poor people,” said Robinson. “There’s a lot of people that are not able to pay for their basic necessities like air conditioning in a hot desert state.”
“Everyone should have the rights to air conditioning, especially here in Arizona,” he said.
Contact the reporter at madeline.ackley@asu.edu.
Update: On April 3, this story was updated to include the fact that Masavi Perea is a member of Chispa.
Madeline is the community editor for Downtown Devil and is a senior studying at the Walter Cronkite School. She is a local freelance journalist who primarily covers politics, policing, immigration and business. In 2019, she won first place in her category in the national SPJ Mark of Excellence Awards for her reporting on deported veterans in Tijuana, Mexico with Cronkite News.
