By Andy Brack
The Tuesday admission by a senior state senator urgently pushing passage of a controversial energy bill is a stark indictment of a broken legislative system.
“I think nobody has read this bill, nobody,” state Sen. Gerald Malloy, D-Darlington, admitted during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting. The revelation came during an argument over whether to send the bill to the Senate floor – which would speed up the process – or slow down and consider it in committee like work is supposed to be done.
“That’s a pretty good reason to give it fair consideration before we vote on it, right?” S.C. Sen. Wes Climer, R-York, asked, trying to put the brakes on this legislation that would dramatically rewrite energy policy in favor of utilities and relieve regulatory pressures which protect consumers.
Malloy wasn’t having it, according to reporting by The State newspaper: “If you don’t like (the bill) you object to it, you can move to carry over, continue, recommit or table it,” he said. “You have many opportunities in the process to stop or delay a bill, so unless we’re trying to kill (the bill) you don’t put it back in committee without having a pathway forward.”
The unmitigated gall. The irresponsibly. And it benefits who? The powerful utilities who helped draft 77 pages of complicated policy legislation secretly as critics and neighbors got frozen out of the process.
And legislators wonder why many people no longer trust them. This kind of insider mess smells much worse than anything emanating from a factory pig farm.
“That is how we get high electric bills in South Carolina – by having legislators pass whatever the utility company lawyers write without even reading it,” noted longtime energy analyst Eddy Moore, decarbonization director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.
Another critic, who asked to be unnamed, was even more pointed: “This is legislative malpractice when you openly admit you are going to advance the bill out of committee having never read the bill. That’s shocking.”
Unfortunately, we’ve been down this road before. We’ve seen how bad energy policy costs billions of dollars and requires a huge bailout by ratepayers.
Remember, it wasn’t too many years ago that the General Assembly passed the Base Load Review Act, which quickly led to the stellar idea of building an expensive nuclear plant in Fairfield County. But when it failed – at a cost of more than $9 billion – guess who was left holding the bag?
And now, guess who wants the state to commit to more bad energy policy to build an expensive natural gas plant and costly pipeline system surrounded by protected land in rural Colleton County? Yep, the very same utility players who led us into the nuclear fiasco.
Regardless of anything in the bill, the backroom dealing that got it to this point – not to mention the lack of transparency and broad public input – should have been enough to turn noses.
Greenville lawyer Tom Ervin, who recently resigned from the state Public Service Commission because of the games and shenanigans being played out with the energy bill, said it simply was not in the interest of South Carolinians.
“This bill is loaded with items that would only benefit the profit margins for these monopoly investor-owned utilities at the expense of poor ratepayers.”
Moore said if the bill passed, you would be handing over a credit card to the utility companies.
“This bill could easily add over $1,000 for every man, woman, and child in South Carolina to electric system costs while actually blocking cheaper alternatives,” he said.
South Carolinians should be outraged at the flagrant way they’re being punked by legislators doing the bidding of utilities. Sure, we may need to start generating more power. But twerking the system without proper process and consideration is a terrible way to govern.
Call your state senators today and remind them that there’s an election in November. Get them to kill this bill instead of drowning us with legislation they haven’t even read.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper. Have a comment? Send to feedback@statehousereport.com.
