Being a Rhode Island legislator is a challenging calling to pursue. To start with, we pay our state legislators less than $20,000 per year. This is not enough to quit your day job. And in this part-time gig, we expect our legislators to understand a number of complex legal, legislative, economic, environmental and social issues – at least well enough to vote competently on them.
In the US Congress, members often have a number of paid staff to help them navigate these complexities. But here in Rhode Island, the staffing in the General Assembly is thin, and much of the work of research and analysis falls on the legislators themselves.
I’m personally never surprised when legislators don’t seem fully informed on all the details of the matters they are asked to vote on. How could they? What kind of polymath who doesn’t sleep or have a personal life would you have to be in order to master all of these different issues?
The challenges in keeping up with so many issues can also make our legislature vulnerable to industries that will take advantage of complexity, and their lobbyists.
This is why I’m always impressed when I meet a legislator who really understands a complicated topic. And I can think of no set of issues more intricate and challenging than our electricity system and regulation of electric utilities. As an analyst dealing with federal energy policy, I personally understand just enough of these issues to get a sense of just how much there is to know – particularly at the practical level.
Dawn Euer is one of those rare legislators. Having worked with Dawn on renewable energy issues, I have seen the depth and breadth of her practical understanding of Rhode Island’s electricity system and state regulation of our utility. Her ability to navigate these thorny issues and help to inform her fellow legislators is truly impressive – and much needed.
Utilities like Rhode Island Energy (RIE) and its Pennsylvania-based parent company PPL consistently hold the upper hand in the skewed playing field of information. And while every utility says they are working in the interests of their customers, the fiduciary responsibility of investor-owned utilities is to their shareholders – not to those of us paying the bills they send.
The General Assembly is a vital check on the power of RIE. Yes, our state regulators like the Division of Public Utilities and Carriers (DPUC) are supposed to hold them to account. However, the phenomenon of regulatory capture – in which a regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or political concerns of the industry or group it is meant to oversee – is unfortunately rife in US utility regulation.
One need look no further than the DPUC Administrator’s recent testimony in favor of scrapping our state’s renewable energy targets – testimony that could just as easily have been written by RIE’s lobbyist.
And this is another reason why it is important to keep Dawn Euer in the General Assembly. Dawn is not just the lead author of our state’s groundbreaking Act on Climate. She’s also fought consistently for stronger action to confront the climate crisis and to hold our utility to account in the process.
We may pay our legislators like glorified interns, but the General Assembly is not amateur hour. We need to bring Dawn back for more sessions. Her experience, her smarts, and her grit are needed, and will be for the foreseeable future.
Christian Roselund
