Detective work by a self-appointed watchdog of Nevada’s Public Utilities Commission discovered the regulatory board’s top attorney was using an alias to post online comments about matters before the quasi-judicial body.
PUC General Counsel Carolyn Tanner resigned last month, one day after citizen activist Fred Voltz presented the commission examples of her using the pseudonym “Dixie Rae Sparx” to tweet and leave comments about utility issues. Tanner later told an interviewer the two events were not related.
Voltz, a commercial property manager from Northern Nevada and a fixture at PUC meetings, researched the source of an online comment and discovered that Tanner and Sparx were the same person.
"I did a Google search of a Twitter account with the same name of Dixie Rae Sparx and then I connected the same picture that was on the Twitter account to Miss Tanner's Facebook page, and son of a gun, if it wasn't one in the same," Voltz told KNPR's State of Nevada.
Voltz said he knew this situation would be a liability for rate payers.
"The rate payers are going to be stuck footing the bill for this," he said, "If this type of behavior can be shown to have influenced other decisions the PUC has made."
Last week Las Vegas-based data-center company Switch cited the episode when it sued the PUC, Tanner, and NV Energy for $30 million. The suit alleges that improper communication by Tanner tainted the regulators’ decision to deny Switch the option of buying its power from sources other than NV Energy.
Voltz believes other businesses that have applied to the PUC to leave NV Energy and have been denied may decide to challenge those decisions based on this information.
Daniel Rothberg has been covering the case for the Las Vegas Sun.
He agreed that this whole thing could led more companies to question the PUC's decision making.
"I think a lot of other parties that have had proceedings before the PUC in this time could come back and say, 'Wait, there was this communication going on. The lawyer who was representing this quasi-judicial body was biased. Our case should be reviewed again,'" he said.
Voltz said this case is really an example of a much bigger problem with the PUC.
“The core of the issue is the Public Utilities Commission has a statutory responsibility to serve the public interest," he said, "And what they mean by that is that it’s supposed to balance the interest of the rate payers against those of the investor-owned utilities. That has not been happening for a very long time.”
He said the commissioners are not elected, but appointed by the governor. There is no oversight and the rate payers are represented by the Bureau of Consumer Protection, which he says is underfunded.
“What there needs to be in my opinion first is a full operational audit of the PUC we have attorneys with attorneys there,” Voltz said.
He believes a oversight board filled with rate payers to watch over the PUC would help.
“It just bothers me when I see people who are supposed to be public servants not serving the public interest,” Voltz said.
NV Energy issued a statement, “We are surprised and disappointed with this turn of events” and “we will vigorously defend our company and our employees from baseless claims.”
(Editor's Note: KNPR News asked Carolyn Tanner, the PUC and Switch to be part of the program. All refused because of the pending litigation)
Fred Voltz, citizen activist and PUC watchdog; Daniel Rothberg, reporter, Las Vegas Sun