Arizona Corporation Commission building in downtown Phoenix.
The Buzz for October 18, 2024
AZPM's Your Vote 2024 election coverage continues this week with a down ballot race that can have serious consequences for Arizonans' bank accounts. Three of the five seats on the Arizona Corporation Commission are on the ballot. The body oversees a variety of duties, but most people know it as the group that sets the rates that utility companies can charge.
The Corporation Commission is organized into eight divisions. Among its other duties are ensuring the safety of pipelines and rail, keeping a registry of companies that are licensed to do business in Arizona, monitoring those who offer securities and investments, and enforcing rules around its duties.
And most of its roughly 250 staff have little interaction with the officials who are being elected this November.
"I manage the staff. We work together to make sure we're meeting the goals and objectives of the organization," said ACC Executive Director Doug Clark. "The elected officials help set the direction of the commission, there's no doubt about that. Each one of them received a million or so votes, and they represent the people of Arizona from an elected perspective, and they're here to make sure we're doing the business of the people, but in essence, that gets transferred from the electeds through me down to manage the staff of the organization."
He said that the commission's various jobs help ensure that the people of Arizona are not being taken advantage of.
"We are a very publicly available organization, and sometimes it's intimidating to access or talk to organizations that are as big as us and do so many various items and things. So I highly recommend people go to our website and review their options of communicating with us."
Voters will have a choice to fill the three open seats with a field that includes three Republicans, three Democrats and two Green Party candidates. The Republican field is incumbent Leah Marquez Peterson, Rene Lopez and Rachel Walden. The Democrats running are Ylenia Aguilar, Jonathon Hill and Joshua Polacheck. The Green Party candidates are Mike Cease and Dr Nina Luxenberg.
Interviewing a field of candidates that size can be a notable task for a news outlet, and KAWC, the NPR station in Yuma, has done just that. The station has been interviewing candidates on its show Arizona Edition since August.
"The thing that came up consistently across all eight interviews was the concern that Arizonans have no idea what the ACC is or what it does," said Lou Gum, KAWC's News Director and host of Arizona Edition. "And that came up every conversation as a sort of a learning curve for everyone in the state. And I admitted that learning curve in talking to them and said, you know, this comes up every election season. I feel like I learn a little bit more about this commission every time it comes up. And that was across the board."
Gum said Republican candidates were largely concerned with balancing the issues of reliability, low cost and utility profits, which are guaranteed in the Arizona Constitution. Democratic and Green Party candidates added to that list the idea of a balanced portfolio that increases the state's share of renewable energy. They also argued that electricity rates could go down.
"In general, I would say Republicans don't see a path to lowering rates. With one caveat, the 350 plus small water companies that manage water utilities across the state came up, and Republicans seem to think that that's an area ripe for consolidation. They think companies should buy each other up. And Democrats say that a lot of those companies are from out of state, but they see that as one area where some of those rate increases for those smaller companies have been sort of very high because these smaller companies just don't have the capacity to afford some of the things that they need to do if their pump goes down or the infrastructure goes down."
This episode of The Buzz also featured a segment from our Fact Check Arizona podcast episode that examined a recent Clean Elections Commission debate among the major-party candidates. You can find that episode here.
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