RICK BRUNDRETT thenerve.org
COLUMBIA -- An incumbent state Public Service Commission member, a past commissioner and an ex-PSC attorney are among six candidates who have applied for a PSC seat in a “do-over” election imposed by lawmakers in May.
The former PSC attorney, who dropped out of a May race for another PSC seat, recently moved so she could run for the open seat, a state government spokesman confirmed to The Nerve. State law requires no minimum time to live in a particular district to be a PSC candidate.
The process to fill the $107,822 seat has dragged on for more than a year, as The Nerve has reported.
The election for the District 2 seat is particularly important now as the seven-member commission is expected to decide by the end of this year whether to allow South Carolina Electric & Gas to continue charging customers to pay down debt for the failed $9 billion V.C. Summer nuclear project, and whether to approve a proposed $14.6 billion merger between SCANA Corp., the parent company of SCE&G, and Virginia-based Dominion Energy.
A federal judge has ruled that SCE&G ratepayers can receive a temporary 15 percent reduction in their electric bills. SCANA shareholders voted to sell their company to Dominion.
Lawmakers in 2007 quietly approved a law, called the Base Load Review Act, which allowed the PSC to impose the SCE&G rate hikes for the V.C. Summer project. SCE&G customers collectively have paid more than $2 billion under the law for the Fairfield County project, which was abandoned a little over a year ago.
PSC candidates are screened and nominated for election in the General Assembly by a legislatively controlled committee known as the State Regulation of Public Utilities Review Committee (PURC), which largely controls the regulation of utilities in South Carolina.
Under state law, PURC can nominate no more than three candidates for a PSC seat.
On the last day of regular session in May and in a move not seen in recent PSC elections, lawmakers in an unrecorded voice vote approved a motion to reject the entire slate of three nominated candidates for the four-year District 2 seat. That allowed incumbent Elliott Elam Jr. of Lexington, who was one of the nominees, to continue serving until another election is held.
Asked why he introduced the motion to reject the entire candidate slate, Rep. Gary Simrill, R-York, told The Nerve then that Elam, who was first elected in 2014, had recently voted to “give SCE&G yet another rate increase,” though that vote wasn’t specifically tied to the V.C. Summer project.
Elam, an attorney and former consumer advocate at the S.C. Department of Consumer Affairs, is running again for the congressional District 2 seat, which covers all of Lexington, Aiken and Barnwell counties; and parts of Richland and Orangeburg counties.