A clean energy watchdog group has filed a lawsuit against Georgia energy regulators and an elected member of the agency’s board for allegedly violating the state’s open records law.
The Energy and Policy Institute, a California-based nonprofit, alleges Georgia Public Service Commissioner Tricia Pridemore uses personal email accounts and her cellphone for public business. The PSC’s five elected board members set rates for utilities, including Georgia Power, and the board also regulates telecommunications companies.
Pridemore and the Public Service Commission failed to turn over public records the nonprofit sought from Pridemore’s personal accounts in violation of the Georgia Open Records Act, according to the complaint filed Dec. 19 in Fulton County Superior Court.
The Open Records Act requires public agencies to respond to records requests within three business days and to provide records as soon as they are available. Sunshine laws in Georgia generally provide that all communications among public officials are public records, and the laws have been interpreted by the state attorney general’s office to cover personal communication devices if those devices are used to conduct public business.
State law allows the courts to impose civil penalties of up to $1,000 per violation for any person “who negligently violates” the provisions.
The complaint includes documentation of email correspondence to Pridemore’s personal accounts the institute said it received through records requests it made to other states. An Energy and Policy Institute official also witnessed Pridemore using her phone, including to send text messages, during a June conference of the Southeastern Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, the lawsuit states.
The complaint names Pridemore as a defendant in her individual and official capacities, alongside several unnamed commission staff who handled the requests. It seeks an injunction requiring regulators to comply with the Open Records Act, as well as civil penalties for the defendants and recovery of legal fees for the plaintiff.
PSC spokesman Tom Krause said the agency and commissioners do not comment on pending litigation. Pridemore said Thursday she had not been served a copy of the complaint and also declined comment citing pending litigation.
The Energy and Policy Institute states its mission is to “expose attacks on renewable energy and counter misinformation” by fossil fuel and utilities. The group has sued regulators for public records in other states, including Tennessee and Indiana, with mixed results.
In June, Daniel Tait, the group’s research and communications director, requested copies of text messages sent and received during the Southeastern Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners conference and a document Pridemore was seen reading off her phone during the conference, the suit said. In response, the PSC provided a single “short text message thread” and did not provide the document.
The suit said Tait tried twice to clarify whether other responsive text messages existed and was told no other responsive records were available.
In August, the suit said the institute learned from documents obtained from other states that records were sent to a personal email address for Pridemore during the time of the conference. Tait requested documents from that address, according to the lawsuit, and the PSC responded that “Commissioner Pridemore has stated she does not retain any messages related to the Commission on that email address and she requests that any communication be sent to her official email address.”
A second, broader request for records garnered the same response.
The nonprofit said it also received information showing Pridemore received documents at a second personal email address. In October, Tait made another request for all emails that related to commission work and a list of key words from Pridemore’s second personal address spanning about nine months.
Five days later, the PSC responded saying “Commissioner Pridemore has reviewed the referenced email address … and has found no records pertaining to this request.”
In an interview, Tait said the institute was filing first and foremost to uphold transparency laws. The nonprofit is also investigating the influence of utilities like Georgia Power over the elected officials who are tasked with regulating them, including approving rate hikes and overall resource planning, he said.
“We don’t know exactly what could be in (the records) because we haven’t seen them,” Tait said. “But we suspect that there could be utility coordination, which is why we filed the public records request to begin with, or there may be something of public interest in there — we just don’t know, but we’re going to fight for it.”
Richard T. Griffiths of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, which is not involved in the lawsuit, called the allegations “very troubling.”
“If an agency claims that they have done a search and have no records, yet they show up in the records provided by open records responses from other states, that’s a strong indicator that the system has broken down,” he said.
The PSC is an elected body responsible for ensuring consumers receive safe, reliable and reasonably priced services from investor-owned utilities. In Georgia, that gives them jurisdiction over Georgia Power but not the dozens of electric cooperatives that serve mostly rural areas.
As of January, Georgia Power’s ratepayers will have faced six hikes since the start of 2023 to pay for fuel costs, the expansion of Plant Vogtle and more. All told, the increases have raised the average customer’s bill by about $43, according to data from Georgia Power. An earlier estimate by the Southern Environmental Law Center pegged the amount at about $44.
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