Sedona AZ (June 17, 2015) – The following is a letter to the SedonaEye.com editor:
State Attorney General’s Office Complicit in ACC Lawlessness
Information & Perspective by Warren Woodward
Sedona, Arizona ~ June 16, 2015
The ACC is tasked with the responsibility to protect AZ ratepayers by weighing the costs and benefits of all state utility requests.
Today I spoke with Don Conrad, the head of the Arizona Attorney General’s Criminal Division. I had wanted to set up an appointment to discuss laws broken by the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC), in particular the ACC’s multiple violations of A.R.S. 40-253 (as outlined in detail on pages 2 through 7 of my appeal here: http://images.edocket.azcc.gov/docketpdf/0000163221.pdf ).
Those violations are not a matter of opinion. A.R.S. 40-253 specifies the procedure the ACC must follow when dealing with an appeal. In the case of my appeal of last December, the ACC’s multiple violations of A.R.S. 40-253 are part of the public record. In other words, anyone can look up what the law says. Then they can look up the time-line of ACC actions and see that the record is clear – the ACC broke the law repeatedly.
But in the phone conversation with Don Conrad today, he told me that he had reviewed what I’d sent him and that his position was that the matter was not worth his time or resources to pursue.
Amazing!
I report a crime, I provide the evidence, but both the crime and evidence are purposely and willfully overlooked by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office (AG). You can’t make this stuff up! The AG website claims: “The Arizona Attorney General’s Office is dedicated to a system of justice that is inclusive of crime victims and will remain vigilant in striving to provide the most efficient and effective service to the people of Arizona.”
What a pack of liars! They really should add an asterisk after that sentence, taking the reader to some fine print that says, “Except for ACC crime victims in which case strike the word, “vigilant,” and substitute with “asleep.””
I tried arguing with Conrad but it (he) was hopeless.
Does anyone think it would be different if I was reporting a crime done by “ordinary” people and not those in power?
Incidentally, this is the very same AG office that refused to investigate APS for consumer fraud despite me (once again) doing their work for them by providing copious amounts of evidence of APS lying to and misleading the public.
This is the very same AG office that has done nothing in three months regarding my Open Meeting Law complaint against the ACC despite me (once again) providing the evidence that the ACC was in violation.
By the way, Conrad is one of two lead investigators at the AG Office of the ongoing ACC corruption scandal. The so-called “investigation” is several months old but to my knowledge search warrants have not even been issued. I think it’s an easy prediction that the so-called “investigation” will be nothing but a whitewash.
Last December, Harvard University’s Center for Ethics concluded a study entitled Measuring Illegal and Legal Corruption in American States: Some Results from the Corruption in America Survey. Is anyone surprised that Arizona topped the list?
Just a guess but maybe that’s part of the campaign to make Arizona more attractive to business. (The study is here: http://ethics.harvard.edu/blog/measuring-illegal-and-legal-corruption-american-states-some-results-safra ).
Meanwhile, the ACC corruption scandal continues to unfold.
“Stump has said there’s nothing to see here ….” Ha! Of course there isn’t now that he’s deleted his messages and chucked his phone.
Read all about it: http://www.azcentral.com/story/laurieroberts/2015/06/17/bob-stump-deleted-emails-to-aps/28883717/
Reply
I clicked on the link you provided and it has been “blacked” out or redacted. At first when you arrive at the site you can read a bit then the text is blocked. If you refresh the page quickly it is possible to read some of the article. Whew…
I was able to snatch the text on my clipboard then removed the text styles. Yikes!
Surprise surprise, Corp Comm messages to APS are gone
Laurie Roberts
So a state regulator is regularly texting a utility executive, a pair of utility-friendly candidates and the head of a dark-money group that campaigned for those candidates. He then routinely deletes the text messages, despite the fact that such communications are public record.
And when questions arise about the content of those messages, we are told he’s thrown away his cell phone. His state-supplied cell phone.
Convenient, isn’t it?
If you’re not following the saga of the Arizona Corporation Commission and its rather cozy relationship with Arizona Public Service, then don’t be surprised to wake up one day to see that your electric bill has shot up like a Phoenix thermometer on a June afternoon.
You already know much of this stunning story, how APS is widely believed to have secretly funneled several million dollars into a 2014 campaign to get a pair of utility-friend candidates elected to the commission that sets electric rates – secret funding that’s entirely legal and absolutely odiferous.
How cagey APS executives won’t say that they did it and won’t say that they didn’t do it.
How corporation commissioners won’t force the utility to open its books to see how its spending ratepayer money, even though it would take just one of the five commissioners to issue such an order.
You may also know that Checks and Balances Project — a public watchdog blog that advocates for clean energy policies and is largely funded by a dark-money non-profit known as Renew American Prosperity — has obtained cell phone logs that call into question whether Commissioner Bob Stump acted as a go-between last year in order to coordinate activities between APS and its favored candidates, Tom Forese and Doug Little.
According to the logs, Stump was madly texting Forese and Little during the run-up to last year’s election, along with an APS executive and the head of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, which spent nearly $450,000 on an independent dark-money campaign aimed at getting the pair elected to the commission that regulates utilities. APS is widely believed to have supplied funding to the Free Enterprise Club and a second dark-money group in order to secure the election of Forese and Little.
In all, the logs show Stump sent 56 emails to Barbara Lockwood, an APS executive, between June and September and 46 to Mussi. He sent about 180 to Forese and Little, who enjoyed $3.2 million in dark money support from AzFEC and that second dark-money group, Save Our Future Now.
Stump has said there’s nothing to see here, that his calls to Lockwood were unrelated to Forese and Little’s campaign and that Mussi is an old friend. It seems Stump was merely trying to coordinate a trip to the symphony when he called Mussi 46 times during the campaign season.
Meanwhile, the commission has said there’s nothing to see here because Stump also sent texts to rooftop solar executives.
Of course, whenever a public official says there’s nothing to see, it behooves those who are doing the looking to dig a little deeper. So the folks at Checks and Balances, skeptics that they are, have demanded that the Corporation Commission turn over Stump’s text messages or, in the alternative, to secure Stump’s phone so that commission staff can try to retrieve the deleted messages.
Now the commission has informed Checks and Balances that Stump routinely deleted all of his text messages and then deleted the state-issued phone, by disposing of it.
According to the Arizona Capitol Times, the commission’s attorney, David Cantelme, sent a letter to Checks and Balances, informing the non-profit that Stump deleted commission-related texts from his commission-issued phone “consistent with Arizona law and applicable document-retention protocols.”
I’m not sure how Cantelme can say that Stump was OK to delete those messages, given that the lawyer admits that he never actually saw what was in those messages.
He also didn’t explain why Stump curiously didn’t return his state-issued phone rather than disposing of it himself. Cantelme said the phone “had passed into obsolescence.”
So, too, apparently has the idea of a Corporation Commission that actually regulates utilities.
@ S.Amon — The link works. What happens is, if you are not a subscriber to the Arizona Republic a survey pops up that takes over the whole page and you have to answer a few questions to continue reading.
BTW, it’s a pity that the AZ Republic did not investigate the ACC lawyer’s claims by getting some other legal opinions on what Stump did.
I didn’t find that the link works as you suggest. I am not a subscriber to the AZ Republic as a fact. The website is behaving in a completely different way that it was this morning of the 21st of June. I am a very experienced Internet user and former programmer. This must be a very sensitive subject for all parties.
@ S.Amon — I just tried the link again after reading your post. Here’s what pops up covering the article. All I have to do is answer the question and the article then appears.
Answer a survey question to continue reading this content
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