Sam Randazzo last week resigned as chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) amid a federal bribery investigation and shortly after the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched his home. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine named Randazzo, a longtime player in Ohio electric utility policy and politics, to the PUC in February 2019.
The context of the resignation is the scandal over Ohio’s House Bill 6, which was a bailout for Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp.’s nuclear and coal fired plants. The FBI charged bribery and racketeering, which led to the Republican speaker of the Ohio house to step down. He was subsequently indicted.
Randazzo’s resignation also came less than a day after a FirstEnergy Securities and Exchange Commission filing revealed that the company fired senior managers, including CEO Chuck Jones, because they paid out $4 million to a consulting company “associated with an individual who subsequently was appointed to a full-time role as an Ohio government official directly involved in regulating FE’s Ohio distribution companies.”
Among other interests, Randazzo owns Sustainability Funding Alliance of Ohio and IEU Administration Co Sustainability Alliance of Ohio. The Ohio-based Journal-News newspaper reported, citing a company bankruptcy filing, that Randazzo’s firms both worked for FirstEnergy.
In his resignation letter, Utility Dive reported, Randazzo said that “the impression left by an FBI raid on our home, the statement included in FirstEnergy’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday, and the accompanying publicity will, right or wrong, fuel suspicions about and controversy over decisions I may render in my current capacity.”
A lawyer, Randazzo has been a player in Ohio utility regulation for decades. He began his career, as a young PUCO staffer. Later, he was an assistant Ohio attorney general, before entering private practice. Since 1992, he represented Industrial Energy Users-Ohio, which advocated for separating generation and distribution during the Buckeye State’s electric industry restructuring.
Before DeWine named him to head the PUCO, Randazzo spent many years at the Columbus office of the Washington-based McNeese, Wallace & Nurick law firm.
As a private practice lawyer and lobbyist, and at the PUCO, Randazzo has been an opponent of state-sponsored programs to advance renewable energy. That’s in line with the views of the industrial clients for which he was long and advocate.
The Ohio Consumers Power Alliance commented, “Our organizations opposed the appointment of Randazzo from the beginning of the nomination process. His decades-long career as an anti-clean energy lobbyist and lawyer made him the wrong choice to oversee regulation of Ohio’s utilities and protect Ohio consumers.
“Throughout the last several months, Randazzo claimed he had no ties to FirstEnergy, the corporation at the center of a $61 million bribery and corruption scandal that rocked Ohio in July. But bankruptcy filings told a different story, directly tying two companies owned by Randazzo, Sustainable Funding Alliance of Ohio and IEU Administration Company, to FirstEnergy Solutions.”
— Kennedy Maize