Brown: LIPA close to getting oversight

It's taken more than a decade to craft an acceptable way to make the Long Island Power Authority more transparent and accessible to its customers.

The State Assembly last week passed a LIPA oversight bill that, before the month is through, likely will clear the state Senate and be signed into law by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

The measure will require an independent assessment of how the power company works. It also will provide for hearings along with an agency -- other than LIPA -- to appeal complaints about LIPA's service.

It is astonishing that something so simple, so necessary, would take so long, even though dissatisfaction with the utility has been building for years.

"I've been trying to get this done for more than a decade," Assemb. Robert Sweeney, who sponsored the Assembly-passed measure, said Friday. He'd made other attempts -- two of which passed the Assembly -- before opponents successfully shut down the effort.

What's maddening is that the idea of transparency and accountability had been a part of LIPA's formative DNA. The authority, created by Gov. Mario Cuomo and the state legislature in 1986, was supposed to have an elected board as a way of ensuring transparency and accountability.

But it would take 12 years for the public authority to assume control of the private Long Island Lighting Co., after a series of starts and stops and a battle over LILCO's aborted plans to operate a nuclear power plant at Shoreham.

LIPA did not assume control of LILCO until 1998, after Gov. George Pataki came to the same conclusion that public power advocates had reached a decade earlier: The only way to provide significant rate relief to Long Islanders was for New York State to assume control of LILCO.

No one danced in the street, but residents nonetheless were elated that LILCO -- like its hated power plant -- was dead. Early on, LIPA, for a variety of reasons, was able to make good on the promise of reduced rates.

Perhaps that's why there was little outcry when Pataki, who did not support the idea of an elected board, jettisoned the idea.

Five years later, critics, including Sweeney, complained that LIPA's operations were not open enough. "I think that the promise of LIPA has not yet been fulfilled," Sweeney said in 2003. "So much of it, I think, just has to do with being honest to the public. That was one of LILCO's downfalls."

It would, in time, come to be viewed as one of LIPA's, too.

As the years passed, LIPA would be excoriated for establishing surcharges that critics called blatant end-runs around the requirement that significant rate increases go through Public Service Commission review.

There were also complaints about LIPA, at one point, borrowing money so it could give customers a rate decrease. Then came investigations into ratepayer funds being given to support not-for profit groups. And the multi-million-dollar cost of keeping bad weather crews on standby.

And then there are issues that seem just plain silly.

National Grid, the contractor LIPA uses to run the system, has both gas and electric operations on Long Island. Customers who complain about gas issues can appeal to the PSC if they get no satisfaction from the contractor. But because the PSC has no authority over LIPA, customer complaints about LIPA are appealed to -- LIPA.

Under Sweeney's bill, those complaints would go to the state Consumer Affairs Department.

LIPA's long-standing argument against oversight has been that it would add a layer of administration and cost ratepayers money. And that the Wall Street bond market would not approve of any entity stifling LIPA's ability to unilaterally raise rates.

Those arguments worked for years, until the public outcry over LIPA's Tropical Storm Irene debacle overwhelmed them all.

Sweeney credits Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's work on the issue. "His office worked with us and had good ideas on how to make the bill work," Sweeney said.

It's about time.