When it comes to the Dominion-Next ERA merger, Governor Spanberger wants to be in the room where it happens.
The mega-merger between VA’s Dominion Energy utility and the Florida-based behemoth that wants to swallow it up has – and my apologies here — generated caution from elected officials from here in Virginia, but also all the way to Maine.
The Governor has gone a step further than caution, filing a formal “Notice of Participation as a Respondent” with the State Corporation Commission (SCC) this week. That’s a lot of fancy law-talking, but what it means is that the Governor has inserted herself into the regulatory process that will determine whether the merger goes through. The SCC, as well as regulatory boards in other states, have the final authority to approve the deal. But the Governor and her Chief Energy Officer, Josephus Allmond, can now interview witnesses that appear before the SCC, and they should gain access to some of the confidential documents that the Commission will use to review the merger.
The request to be a party to the case is, by all accounts, unprecedented. And it reflects the willingness of this Governor to be hands-on when she thinks its required –even when it’s not welcome.
It’s a pattern. After this year’s legislative session closed, Spanberger and her chief of staff, Bonnie Krenz-Schnurman, apparently read and marked-up hundreds of bills themselves. (Reporter David Poole wrote that in their retelling of their editing sessions, they sounded like “two type-A students competing as they powered through the night.”) Their industriousness led to an again-unprecedented number, at least this century, of amendments and vetoes for a Virginia Governor from the same party that controlled the legislature. The Governor’s vetoes clearly contributed to the very public tensions with her Democratic colleagues in the General Assembly.
Spanberger might have learned some lessons from that tense period, especially as Democrats criticized her lack of communication earlier in the legislating process. For this merger, the Governor is certainly jumping in very early, signaling both a possible skepticism about the benefits of the deal for Virginians and a desire to shape the outcome, at least through the bully pulpit. With unprecedented access to merger filings, she’ll likely have the ammunition to make a strong case against the merger if she wants to. And she will have experience at her side in Allmond, who litigated cases before the SCC during his time as an attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville. If I wanted this merger to succeed, as Dominion and NextERA officials certainly seem to, I would be more than a little worried.
Unlike the vetoes, which generated a lot of “Democrats in Disarray” discourse from political observers – yours truly included! – I don’t think there’s anywhere near as much political risk for the Governor here. Residents across the Commonwealth are increasingly skeptical of large corporations, especially in tech and energy, as we have seen with vocal minority opposition to data centers. Virginians are also extremely attuned to rising energy costs, which are growing in visibility as one of the drivers of the affordability debate/crisis that’s affecting local, state, and national politics. If the Governor finds herself opposing the merger on behalf of Virginia ratepayers, that’s likely going to be a political winner.
Note that the popularity of intervention is separate from the question of whether it’s good policy for the Governor to intervene. The Jefferson Institute’s Derrick Max wrote about this issue in these pages last week, raising some important points about the wisdom of an elected official interfering in a supposedly apolitical regulatory process. Although the idea that SCC politics should stay “insulated from politics” is a little hard to swallow when the Commission’s chair recently worked for the company she’s supposedly regulating and, more importantly, says she will not recuse herself from the case. We will see if Spanberger’s motion this week sets off a new wave of heavy-handed political interference by elected officials in SCC regulatory processes. But I suspect that at least in this case, the Governor has “the people,” broadly understood, on her side.
Whether the merger goes through or not, it will likely be years before we know whether the outcome was good for Virginians, and whether the Governor’s intervention was a good idea. But at this political moment in Virginia, it is certainly good politics.
RICHARD MEAGHER is Professor and Chair of Political Science at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia.
