Last week Portland’s Willamette Week gave its Rogue of the Week honors to a handful of Oregon legislators who seemed to turn themselves into lobbyists for PGE and PacificCorp:

Over the past nine years, Portland General Electric collected nearly $900 million from Oregon ratepayers to cover its income taxes. Instead of paying the taxes, however, PGE’s parent, Enron, kept the money. Other utilities also benefited from similar tax practices, but on a smaller scale.

So, despite the strong objections of PGE, PacifiCorp and other regulated utilities, the 2005 Legislature passed Senate Bill 408, which requires that utilities collect no more for taxes than they actually pay.

Seems perfectly reasonable. Right? Not to a bunch of legislators who then turned around and wrote letters to Oregon’s Public Utility Commission lobbying them to weaken the law. In otherwords, they want to continue to allow energy companies to collect more from you and me in taxes than the companies actually pay.

According to PUC spokesman Bob Valdez, regulators rarely receive this kind of attention from lobbyists legislators. So why would they do something like this? For love? Nope. WW discovered in reports recently filed with the state that the lobbyists legislators who lobbied the the PUC collectively received $25,000 in campaign donations from utility companies in the weeks following the letter writing campaign.

There was one letter writer who, however, did not receive any campaign donations from the utilities:

“I wrote a letter to the PUC [urging full implementation], and I didn’t get any money,” says state Sen. Vicki Walker (D-Eugene), who sponsored SB 408.

For the full scoop on who was involved read WW’s entire peice.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Economy, Elections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.