After taking a ton of flak over its handling of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. before the San Bruno disaster, the California Public Utilities Commission plans to pay an outside consultant $7 million for a “culture” makeover to make the agency more safety-conscious.
The idea is to “integrate safety into all aspects of our work and that of the utilities,” said Terrie Prosper, a spokeswoman for the commission.
The “Strategic Transformational Campaign Project” is the handiwork of Jack Hagan, the pistol-packing brigadier general reservist brought in to shape up the utility watchdog’s safety division after a PG&E gas pipe exploded in San Bruno in 2010, killing eight people and destroying 38 homes.
Critics say the commission historically has been more interested in rate debates than enforcing safety in the utilities it regulates.
In blaming PG&E’s problem-riddled gas system for the San Bruno disaster, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board, Deborah Hersman, took a swipe at “a lax system of oversight and regulatory agencies that placed a blind trust in operators, to the detriment of public safety.”
So now, according to the job specs, the commission is looking for someone to provide training and guidance “related to culture change … to transform the CPUC into the benchmark regulatory agency of safety and accountability.”
“Unbelievable,” said Assemblywoman Nora Campos, D-San Jose.
“They’re outsourcing their core mission,” she said. “It’s an outrage and just another example of the failed leadership at the PUC.”
State Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, whose district includes the devastated San Bruno neighborhood, agreed that replacing the commission’s brass would be the quickest way to “culture change.”
“It all filters down,” Hill said.
A confidential survey that the commission ordered up last year found that staffers and directors believed the agency had failed to make public safety a top priority, with some blaming an overly cozy relationship with the state’s utility giants.
“If we were enforcing the rules, we would not have to worry about a safety culture,” one person told interviewers.
Commission spokeswoman Prosper says the $7 million makeover is in response to recommendations by the National Transportation Safety Board and the Legislature.
But apparently not everyone at the utilities commission was fully up to speed on the contract. No sooner did we start asking questions about the contract than Prosper alerted us Friday that officials were slowing down the bid process to make sure the five-member commission that runs the PUC is “intimately involved.”
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