First, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. fired director Roger Ball, an aggressive champion of consumer interests and the nemesis of the big utilities. Huntsman replaced Ball with former telephone company lobbyist Leslie Reberg. Instead of rejecting Huntsman's nominee and demanding that he name a better-qualified candidate, as law allows, the committee rolled over, accepting Reberg.

Now the committee has gotten its mind right about the Christmas storm of 2003.

You remember. It was the snowstorm in which Utah Power left tens of thousands of customers without electricity, some of them for five frigid days.

Utah Power contends that the storm was a force of nature so severe that the company should not be penalized for the extended outages. This week, the Committee of Consumer Services agreed.

In other words, the lap dog rolled over again.

No one questions that the Christmas storm was severe. But many have questioned from the beginning Utah Power's response to the storm, its botched customer service communication system, its lack of repair crews, its failure to trim trees around power lines, and whether the extent of the damage was caused by the company's failure to keep its distribution system in good repair.

In other words, did Utah Power shave costs and did its customers suffer the results when the system was challenged by a major storm?

Here's what's odd about the Committee of Consumer Services' decision to go along with Utah Power's contention that it was powerless at the hands of Mother Nature. At the same time the committee made that decision, it issued a blistering critique of Utah Power's report on its failures during the storm.

It cited five issues that the storm report failed to address adequately: minimal standards of system reliability in severe storms, manpower to maintain the system, lack of local management, cost-benefit analysis about whether remedies from tree-trimming to burying lines would prevent similar occurrences, and analysis of why municipal utilities in Bountiful and Murray had proportionately many fewer outages during the same storm.

Given these unanswered questions, it is a mystery that the committee could conclude that Utah Power was more a victim of bad weather than of its own business practices.

But lap dogs aren't watchdogs.