Buzz Brockway is doing a great job keeping constituents informed with his weekly Legislative Recap newsletters. In his last email, Recap for week 10, Buzz included the following request for feedback:
“One bill I need your opinion on is SB160 which is assigned to the Governmental Affairs Committee I am a member of. SB160 would allow public utilities and other companies regulated by the Public Service Commission to make campaign donations to Legislators. Currently they are prohibited from doing so. These regulated utilities would still be prohibited from donating to candidates for and members of the Public Service Commission. Please email me at buzz.brockway@legis.ga.gov and let me know what you think about this or any other issue.”
Below is my response to Buzz. Send him your thoughts on SB160
Buzz’s contact info is:
Buzz Brockway
Representative, Georgia State House District 101
504-B Coverdell Legislative Office Building
Atlanta, Georgia 30334
404-656-0188
buzz.brockway@house.ga.gov
www.vote4buzz.com
Here’s my email to Buzz:
Buzz,
Regarding SB160:
Per your summary, “this bill would allow public utilities and other companies regulated by the Public Service Commission to make campaign donations to Legislators.” I am dead set against this unless someone can show me a compelling reason for it. The biggest problem we have now is with “political contributions” by interest groups to politicians.
In many cases, citizens don’t have the ability to choose an alternate supplier, correct? So they are forced to pay to a monopoly for utilities and services, the company supplying the service charges more than required, and the extra money goes to support candidates that the citizen may not agree with. This is just more of the same corruption that is the problem in politics now.
Why should companies regulated by the PSC be able to extract money from their customers to use for the political purposes of the company? If they didn’t have a monopoly, or near monopoly, then it wouldn’t be as bad, but it would still lead to corruption. Given their favored status, this would lead to the same sort of corruption that we see with Public Service Employee Unions. The goal of the PSE unions, and the goal of these companies who want to be able to contribute to political causes, is to game the system so that they can’t lose. These PSC companies will spend $$$$ to elect representatives who will enact favorable legislation to them, and then raise their rates to customers to cover the cost of the political campaigning.
Why don’t the just refund that extra money to the customers in terms of lower rates instead of using it to make political contributions?
As far as the statement “These regulated utilities would still be prohibited from donating to candidates for and members of the Public Service Commission”. That is a red herring if I ever saw one. The reason that these companies want to make political contributions is so they can elect representatives that are friendly to them, to get the laws changed in their favor, so they can stick it to customers.
I am absolutely dead set against this, and I’m passing this email to everyone I know to encourage them to email you back, (since you are on the committee, they should let you know their feelings even if they are not in your district) and let you know how they feel.
Please let me know how you decide to vote on this bill.
Sincerely,
Charles Grizzle