Incessant allegations that Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest utility and one of its largest employers, spent heavily to influence the elections of its regulators last year are weighing heavily on the minds of some of those same regulators.

The conventional wisdom is that the outcome of next year’s Corp Comm race is likely to hinge on who teams up with Bitter Smith and Burns, the two incumbents seeking re-election.

Burns doesn’t sound keen on taking up the Republic’s suggestion that he compel APS to disclose whether it spent money on the Corp Comm race last year. But while Burns might not want to revisit last year’s campaigns, he told our reporter he is interested in what utilities do in next year’s Corp Comm races.

In a much anticipated environmental case, a divided U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency may not disregard costs in deciding whether to regulate coal-fired plants in order to reduce mercury and other toxic emissions.

The Corporation Commission agreed to turn over Commissioner Bob Stump’s phone to a retired judge and independent technology expert to see if any text messages are retrievable and subject to public records laws.

Lately, accusations of impropriety within the ranks of the Corporation Commission have been released in various news media. It is imperative that the officials of the most powerful group affecting the pocketbooks of the greatest portion of the state’s population remain unbiased and deal with only “the facts at hand” over the rate cases they preside.

Energy regulator Bob Stump routinely deleted text messages on his cellphones, including public records that cannot be retrieved, the Arizona Corporation Commission disclosed.

The Arizona Corporation Commission is pushing back against the narrative that energy regulators are beholden to the utilities.

The Corp Comm is in no mood to furnish the DC-based Checks and Balances Project with additional information about Stump’s text messages. The group has been digging into Stump’s email and text communications to prove its point that Arizona’s energy commissioners have been lost to “regulatory capture,” the idea that regulators act more as consultants of the industries that they oversee than as objective overseers.

Another Arizona electric co-op is proposing to reduce savings rooftop solar customers enjoy by dropping the rate it pays users for excess power generated by solar panels, joining a handful of proposals from other utilities.