Gift for Danielle’ irritates official
By MARGARET NEWKIRK
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/12/06Who is Danielle?
That’s how Georgia Public Service Commissioner Angela Speir set off a first public airing Thursday of a long-awaited audit of Atlanta Gas Light — an audit that says the company overcharged customers $664,810 through environmental cleanup fees.
“We have an item marked ‘gift for Danielle,’ ” Speir said, referring to a list of expenses passed through to ratepayers and attached to the audit.
“Who is Danielle? Why would ratepayers buy her a gift and what did that have to do with an environmental cleanup? Do you have any justification for why this gift was purchased?” she asked the audit’s lead staff analyst.
Speir’s opening shot began what’s likely to be a touchy debate at the PSC over the staff’s audit report on a long-running and now substantially finished AGL program to clean up buried coal tar sites around the state.
AGL is contesting the audit’s findings almost entirely, saying its being penalized for spending that helped bring a notoriously difficult environmental job to conclusion and saved customers tens of millions in the process.
Just as touchy is who spent a big part of the questioned money.
The audit says AGL customers were overcharged $400,000 through a beefy community relations program run by Commission Chairman Stan Wise’s friend and former campaign manager, Shawn Davis, then working for a company owned by one of Wise’s top campaign donors, Gwinnett County entrepreneur Virgil Williams.
Wise did not attend Thursday’s meeting. A PSC spokesman said he was out of town on family matters.
AGL says it’s willing to reimburse its customers $50 of the $664,810 the audit says they’re owed.
The $50 is a late fee incurred by a contractor who failed to pay a light bill.
But the company said another audit finding, which says AGL double-billed ratepayers for a $243,000 executive salary, is factually wrong.
And it says the $400,000 in community relations spending saved ratepayers more than 100 times as much, by staving off litigation and helping persuade property owners to accept less costly cleanup efforts.
AGL attorney Craig Dowdy said the savings were at least $45 million, and that the benefit flowed to ratepayers.
“The staff is asking the commission — after that benefit has been received — to disallow the spending that helped bring it about,” Dowdy said.
Commissioners Speir and Robert Baker argued that those savings need to be proved, that the expenses passed on to consumers were unreasonable on their face and that the refunds recommended in the audit may not go far enough.
They said it appeared that no one at AGL had been minding the store until the PSC staff began its probe, and that expenses had been passed on to customers routinely and without question.
“I’m looking at auto detailing,” said Speir, interrupting Dowdy at one point.
“Gatorade. Barbecues. Quail hunting trips. Gifts for folks we don’t know who they are or what they’re for. We have line items of $3,000 and there’s nothing to say what they are, except question marks.”
The list also included apartment cleaning, a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, ibuprofen, a $548 meal that included three bottles of wine and some beer, a $24 fish sandwich and public relations chores both complicated and mundane billed at $200 per hour.
One $200-per-hour bill was for the task of putting gift cards in Christmas baskets.
Baker homed in on the hourly billings submitted by Davis and others then working for an environmental company owned by Williams under a subcontract with AGL.
He said the money represented profit for Williams, generated by employees working on salaries undoubtedly lower than the hourly rate charged to and passed on by AGL.
He said the PSC had intended to reimburse AGL for the costs of the cleanup but that the community relations work became “a profit center for the Williams remediation company.”
Commissioner Doug Everett was the only other commissioner to speak.
He asked the staff to give him commission policies that would have spelled out what expenses could legitimately be charged to ratepayers, before the current audit report said they were inappropriate.
“I’m not aware of anything being provided to the company that would detail what’s acceptable or not,” he said. “Surely, we told them what we wouldn’t allow or not.”
Told that such guidelines hadn’t been in place, he said they should have been.
“We wouldn’t be here today, and the ratepayers wouldn’t be being ripped off.”
With the exception of the last part, Everett’s question dovetails with another argument being made by AGL.
The company says it should not be docked for spending the PSC did not specifically prohibit, and which was not flagged as a problem during regular audits over the years.
Staff analyst Tony Wackerly said the commission’s 1990s ruling setting up the cleanup fee didn’t require AGL to break out spending in detail and that the staff didn’t see the community relations spending until a snapshot audit caught it in 2003. The current audit began then, he said.
In addition to the refunds, the audit recommends a number of changes in how AGL handles pass-through expenses in the future, including limits on spending for hotels, meals, entertainment and travel that mirror strict limits in place at the PSC itself.
The audit does not recommend docking AGL for the $249,000 in identified lodging, meals and entertainment expenses billed to customers under the coal tar program so far.
That includes the gift that ratepayers bought for Danielle, which is listed in audit backup materials as costing $54.
| Find this article at: http://www.ajc.com/business/content/business/stories/0512bizpsc.html |
