The occasion was a packed public hearing, in which state utility regulators, government officials and outraged rate payers faced off against a team of nattily dressed Scotsmen representing PacificCorp, parent company of Utah Power.
People who suffered through it will have little trouble recalling the Christmas snowstorm of ought-three, when colossal power outages along the Wasatch Front left at least 70,000 customers in the dark, some for up to five days. A second storm on New Year’s Day 2004 cut electricity to another 14,000 people. Whole neighborhoods shut down. Many victims were elderly and poor.
PacificCorp officials at that meeting opined about how the company couldn’t possibly have planned for this "force majeure" (French for "big, honkin’ blizzard).
Ball wasn’t buying it. In his clipped British accent, the director of the Utah Committee of Consumer Services produced data on similar storms from 1999 and 2001 that also knocked out power to thousands.
He argued the company had lagged in efforts to trim trees back from power lines, which helped contribute to the crisis. "This suggests there is, in fact, a pattern," Ball said. "It suggests that this event was not as unusual as some have represented it to be."
Ball, whose statutory responsibility was to vigorously and independently represent utility customers in dealings with utility companies, was doing his job. I remember listening to him and nearly sliding off my chair. I had sat through similar hearings as a reporter in other states, where consumers get heard because their advocates have no history of rolling over. But I had rarely seen anyone in Utah speak up so firmly on behalf of the little guys.
We are a nice state. We go along to get along. We don’t like public scenes; we would rather operate behind closed doors and answer questions later.
Which is exactly what we got on March 9, when Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. dumped Ball and gave him 30 minutes to pack up. Huntsman wants to replace Ball with Leslie Reberg, a Democrat and shrewd political operative who was a top aide to former Republican Salt Lake County Mayor Nancy Workman.
Reberg is smart and tough and could do the job. But darn - she worked briefly as a lobbyist for US West in 2000 to help push an anti-consumer bill through the Legislature. Which attests to the fact that you never know what piece of your past might come back to bite you.
The small band of consumer activists that tracks such matters is fighting Reberg’s appointment, fearing she would play too nice with big utilities at the expense of customers.
But the bigger, sadder truth here is less about Reberg and more about an increasingly toothless consumer protection movement in Utah. On Monday, when the Committee of Consumer Services had its chance to test Huntsman’s power to fire the panel’s director, members voted 5-1 against suing the governor.
Members - with the notable exception of longtime public interest lobbyist Betsy Wolf - feared a successful lawsuit would simply prompt the Legislature, as it often does, to exact revenge by passing a law empowering the governor with the right to fire future directors.
Big, missed opportunity there. No one in this business-friendly state is going to hand an easy victory to the utility watchdogs. Ball is a living example of how to fight, and the rest of the committee should be, too.
Look, if you’re going to be cast as a "pit bull," you might as well play the part. Go down snarling and biting. Please, don’t just roll over.
hmullen@sltrib.com
