PHOENIX — Gov. Doug Ducey on Wednesday named his administration’s key utility player to be the next state utility regulator.
Andy Tobin will replace Susan Bitter Smith on the five-member Arizona Corporation Commission. Bitter Smith is quitting in the face of allegations, which she denies, by Attorney General Mark Brnovich that her outside jobs with the cable industry and as a lobbyist for Cox Communications are an illegal conflict of interest.
Tobin was speaker of the state House of Representatives before waging an unsuccessful bid last year for Congress. Ducey then named him to head the Department of Weights and Measures.
He later became Ducey’s pick as director of the Insurance Department and has since been tapped by the governor to simultaneously be interim chief of the Department of Financial Institutions.
Tobin will give up his state jobs when he is sworn in to the commission next month.
Ducey believes Tobin’s government and business experince will enable him to start making decisions from day one, said gubernatorial press aide Daniel Scarpinato.
Tobin has something else going for him that the governor wanted on the corporation commission: He’s from outside Maricopa County.
“When you look at the issues — energy, water — that the commission deals with, those really affect rural Arizona because their economy is so dependent on those particular issues,” Scarpinato said.
The commission regulates the rates that investor-owned electric, telephone, water and sewer utilities can charge their customers. It also sets policies that govern utility operations, like how much power electric companies have to generate from solar and other renewable sources.
Tobin, who lives in Paulden in Yavapai County, said his rural perspective is crucial. “If you don’t live there, you just don’t get it,” he said.
The commission has been beset by controversies.
There are allegations that Arizona Public Service funneled money through a “dark money” organization last year to help elect Republicans Tom Forese and Doug Little to the panel — allegations that the state’s largest electric utility has not denied.
And the Attorney General’s Office is looking into texts Bob Stump sent during that campaign from his state-owned cell phone, including texts to an APS executive.
Tobin, however, has a built-in immunity to any charges he is biased in favor of APS: The political action committee of Pinnacle West Capital Corp., the utility’s parent, gave $10,000 this past election cycle to Ann Kirkpatrick, the Democrat who defeated Tobin in the congressional election.
Scarpinato said Ducey is keenly aware of the questions being raised about the panel.
“The governor wanted ... someone of integrity,” he said.
Tobin will serve out the balance of Bitter Smith’s term, through 2016.
He is eligible to seek a four-year term of his own. But Tobin, who served in the state House from 2006 into 2014 before that losing congressional bid, said he’s not leaning in that direction.
“It just hasn’t been on the back of my mind to be a candidate again. I know how to lose a race,” Tobin quipped.
But he is unwilling, at least right now, to rule out entirely another campaign: “A year is a lifetime in public office,” he said.
The move has financial implications.
Commissioners are paid $79,500 a year, a salary set by the Legislature; Tobin said the governor is paying him $149,000 in his current job.
Tobin said, though, he expects to supplement that with outside employment, citing his background in aerospace and manufacturing. There are no laws prohibiting commissioners from having outside employment, and Tobin said he does not foresee running into questions of possible conflicts of interest like the kind that beset Bitter Smith.
Bitter Smith has argued that nothing she did violated conflict-of-interest laws, saying her outside work was with the cable television industry, which is not regulated by the commission. Brnovich, however, said some of the cable firms she represented also offered phone service, which is subject to commission oversight.
