The Public Utilities Commission shouldn’t have closed the public out of a Thursday meeting concerning last weekend’s Xcel electrical outages. Even if the commission had the legal right to close the doors (which is debatable), a government agency should always err on the side of openness – especially when there’s widespread public interest in an issue. And there is intense interest in what happened last Saturday: rolling blackouts affecting 325,000 customers.
Colorado law says public entities should keep their meetings open except when discussing personnel issues, litigation and pending land purchases, but none of those exceptions applied to Thursday’s agenda. The PUC says it has an attorney general’s opinion that it needn’t let the public listen in on staff discussions. Since no commissioners were present, the staffers say the open meetings law didn’t apply. That’s just a bureaucratic way of sidestepping the underlying question: Why shouldn’t the public hear what Xcel had to say?
Xcel says it triggered the outages in order to avoid regionwide electrical failures. The utility has provided multiple public explanations for its inability to maintain service: the weather was colder than predicted; problems arose at a coal-fired power plant; Xcel couldn’t arrange delivery of additional natural gas. Xcel says it alerted the media that rolling blackouts were looming, but the warnings came early Saturday morning so the public may not have been awake to get the message. It was the first time Xcel has had wintertime rolling blackouts, as most outages occur on hot summer days.
Xcel plans to give the PUC a written report by March 10.
We’ve seen nothing to explain why PUC staffers didn’t want the public to hear their discussion with Xcel. The questions now go beyond what happened at Xcel to what’s happening at the PUC.
