If Corp Com wants credibility, it'll have to try harder than this

Comes now the Arizona Corporation Commission with the good news that it is prepared to "go the extra mile in the spirit of openness and transparency."

So, the commission is going to order Arizona Public Service to open its books so that we can see whether utility executives essentially bought themselves a couple of seats on the commission that regulates utilities?

Well … no.

So, the commission is going to release texts from Commissioner Bob Stump's cell phone, so that we can see whether he was acting as a go-between between APS, the utility's favored candidates in last year's election, and a dark-money group widely believed to have been funded by APS?

Well ... no.

But the commission is willing to handpick a retired judge to supervise a forensic examination, to see if the texts sent on Stump's old commission-issued phone – the one he threw away last October -- can be retrieved from Stump's new phone. If so, the commission says it will turn over the texts that it believes constitute a public record.

This, even though the commission's attorney has already said that the texts are gone forever and that even if they weren't, none of them would be considered a public record.

"The Commission intends to go the extra mile in the spirit of openness and transparency," attorney David Cantelme wrote late last week, in a letter to the Washington D.C.-based Checks and Balances Project.

At least, openness and transparency, Corporation Commission style.

Meanwhile, more questions are being raised today about Stump's curious texting tendencies in the run-up to last year's GOP primary, when pro-utility commission candidates Tom Forese and Doug Little were up against a pro-solar slate.

In addition to madly texting an APS executive, the head of a dark-money group and the two APS-supported candidates, it seems Stump also was texting Sean Noble, who has done dark-money work for APS. (Recall 2013, when APS quietly funneled money through Noble to wage a dark-money ad campaign to support APS' goal of making rooftop solar customers pay higher bills.)

Stump has said there's nothing to see here, that he was texting Scot Mussi, who runs the dark-money Arizona Free Enterprise Club, because they were trying to arrange a trip to the symphony. Apparently, it was a herculean task because they texted 73 times between June 28, 2014 and July 29, 2014, according to Stump's phone log, obtained by Checks and Balances.

Stump also traded 44 texts with APS executive Barbara Lockwood in July 2014, the government watchdog says.

Now, Checks and Balances – which advocates for clean energy policies and is itself funding primarily by dark money -- has found that Stump and Noble traded 18 texts over eight days last July then never again during the campaign season.

Stump didn't return a call to talk about it. Noble says they didn't discuss the commission race.

"I was not involved in any Corporation Commission races last year, either directly or as an independent expenditure," he told me, via text.

The commission's executive director, Jodi Jerich, told me on Monday that the commission doesn't have to go further to retrieve Stump's texts but is trying to be responsive.

"There's no legal obligation to do so," she told me. "But in talking about all this, Laurie, I think you had a point in your Friday column. The commission's integrity has been called into question and we have to acknowledge that and we are sensitive to that … I think your point was well taken that we should go and try to retrieve these texts. And that's what we're going to do."

The problem, of course, is that we'll have the take the commission's word for what it finds. That's a tad difficult, given its (in)action to date and its refusal to force APS to open its books.

If the commission really wants to answer questions about its integrity, then it should not only open up Stump's phone records, it should also order APS to open its financial records, so that we can see how ratepayer money was spent last year.

It appears that APS kicked in to get all five commissioners elected to the Corporation Commission.

If they – the regulators who set electric rates –have APS pocket lint in their hair, then we should know.

We should know.