You’ve probably heard about the indictment of Speaker Householder. Here’s a good story on it.
As you know, HB 6 ended the authority to recover funding for the AEP Ohio and Dayton Power & Light programs. Ironically, the FirstEnergy programs, including our Community Connections Program, was untouched by the legislation.
It appears that the old FirstEnergy Solutions (FES), the unregulated generation and marketing subsidiary which owned the plans and which went bankrupt and reemerged as Energy Harbor, was the principal player here. I always felt that the point of HB 6 was to raise the value of the nukes for the hedge funds and investment banks that owned all the loans to FES, and now own North Coast. If you read the indictment, there are a number of FirstEnergy Service Corporation employees that are involved, including corporate officers. (The service corp provides executive, legal, lobbying, and accounting services for all the subsidiaries, which all pay into the service corp.)
It’s been pretty well known around Capitol Square that Householder used FirstEnergy money to support primary candidates that helped make him Speaker, and then expected them to vote for HB 6. It’s just that nobody knew how, but given the Statehouse pay-to-play environment, most of us just shrugged it off.
As you recall, our legal partner Steve Tugend and his team, worked very hard to get us an amendment in the Senate that upped the HEAP transfer to 25%. Our sponsor voted for the bill (but probably would have anyway; that’s another story.) We will now need to protect that transfer from a repeal effort, and we still need to pass the carryover amendment that will let us spend the unspent AEP Ohio and Dayton Power & Light money next year because HB 6 prohibits it.
This follows on the heels of an agreement between Exelon, which controls utilities from Philly to Chicago, to pay a $200 million fine for bribing the Speaker of the House in Illinois.
Enjoy the show.