What’s Likely to Change at Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

Likely changes to the Public Utilities Commission

As I write this, the ultimate fate of the Public Utilities Commission sunset bill, HB26-1326 (the first link below), is unknown. I think that its becoming law is solid enough that we can wrap up what changes to this important unelected body we will see.

Toward that end, I present you a couple of references which make a decent attempt at hitting endpoints on the ideological spectrum. Link 2 is a wrap up report by the Independence Institute’s energy policy writer Sarah Montalbano. Link 3 is to a contemporaneous article by the Colorado Sun’s Mark Jaffe.

I’ll leave it to you to read through either or, what’s better, both. There are some things that stuck out to me as worth special mention. If you see something in there that stuck out to you, please feel free to mention it in the comments.

The first is a thankful note about changes to the length of time until the next PUC sunset review, and the second is nixing the changes to Colorado Open Meetings Law.

Per Montalbano’s piece, quoted with link intact: “Early amendments brought the next sunset review closer to historical norms and nixed radical changes to open-meetings procedure. The bill as introduced wouldn’t have seen another PUC review until 2037, an 11-year window. The version that passed the House set the next sunset review for 2033, a seven-year extension. After bipartisan outcry, the bill sponsors also entirely struck its radical provision to allow commissioners to ‘deliberate privately on adjudicatory matters,’ which even the Colorado Office of Policy, Research, and Regulatory Reform (COPRRR) called a ‘dramatic departure from traditional notions of open meetings.’”

On the minus side of the ledger is nixing a provision to expand the PUC membership as well as requiring some geographic diversity. This is something that I heard multiple groups testifying against at the bill’s hearing. Those sentiments are echoed in Jaffe’s piece. Quoting: “‘I don’t completely understand the focus on fundamentally restructuring the commission right now,’ Overturf, of Western Resource Advocates, said. ‘It is not necessarily going to result in increased efficiency or better outcomes. In fact, they’re just going to raise the costs associated with running the agency. It looks like a solution in search of a problem.’”

There is a fair bit of restructuring of the PUC and how others interact with it. This would fall under the general rubric of “quietly rewiring” the state, changing not any specific moves, but the rules of the game. There are several bits of this from Montalbano’s piece that illustrate this, but they were lengthy and spread throughout what she wrote, so I took pictures and attach here as screenshot 1. Any links you’d like to follow up on can be found in her piece.

Permeating Jaffe’s piece, thus not something particularly quotable, is the sense that the PUC is caught in a dilemma. On the one hand you have the Democrats in the legislature putting various greenhouse gas mandates on them, while at the same time you have a statutory demand that the PUC mandate reliable power at the cheapest cost. Whether you agree or disagree with either mandate, the two do indeed seem incompatible and put the PUC in an awkward position.

None of this, however, seems to have been addressed in this year’s bill. I can’t see the future, but I have to say that it doesn’t bode well for things to come.

This, plus the quiet rewiring I mention above, leaves me a little worried about our state’s energy future and our (as citizens and/or ratepayers) ability to direct things the way we’d like to direct them as conditions change energy-wise.

We’ll leave it there and update as I have more to share. In the meantime, as Amy O’Cooke from the show PowerGab says, get a generator.

**I recall thinking while hearing testimony such as this that I’d be content to leave the PUC as-is if things were going my way too. As a side note on the geographic and ideological diversity, Jaffe’s piece mentions the following about the current PUC Commissioners: “Blank is a Boulder resident. Gilman lives in Edwards and Commissioner Tom Plant is from Buena Vista.” What Jaffe leaves out is, of course, their history which belies their current places of residence.

https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/HB26-1326
https://i2i.org/colorados-puc-sunset-bill-lost-its-worst-provisions/
https://coloradosun.com/2026/05/12/colorado-public-utilities-commission-sunset-bill-five-members/

Related:

In the Sun article above, you’ll note something. Quoting with link intact:

“’The legislature has the lion’s share of the blame here, because they are handing the PUC increasingly incoherent mandates,’ said Sarah Montalbano, an analyst with the Independence Institute, a conservative political nonprofit.”

Pick nearly any Sun article at random, note how they describe the sources, and I will bet you my lunch that the words “liberal”, “left-leaning”, and so on will not be there to describe other sources the Sun uses.

The words “nonpartisan” will likely be, though Independence Institute is equally nonpartisan.

I wrote the Sun’s top editor and the author of this piece to ask if there was a Sun policy about labels; the disparity in treatment is glaring here.

As of this writing, I’ve not heard back.

Yet another example of a trend in progressive press outlets I’ve noted. Labels for some, not for others. More in my op ed below.

https://completecolorado.com/2024/12/26/gaines-the-progressive-press-double-standard-on-ideological-labels/

READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

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