Columnist Jon Ralston: If lights go out, so might some careers

Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2001 | 9 a.m.

Jon Ralston, who publishes the Ralston Report, writes a column for the Sun on Sundays and Wednesdays. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or through e-mail at ralston@vegas.com.

CARSON CITY -- Peter King, writing recently in the Los Angeles Times, noted the relative incomprehensibility of the power deregulation issue, focusing on the alphabet soup names that only insiders understand and citing language from an energy bill that reads as if it were lifted from Finnegan's Wake.

And all the rest of us have, King observed, are "the questions of simpletons: What happened? Will the lights stay on today? How much will we have to pay, this time, to bail out the utilities?"

As Session '01 begins here in California's electric and economic colony, also known as the state of Nevada, the same questions apply to the issue, the same abstruseness boggles all but the minds of a handful of lawmakers, and the simplest questions can be reduced even further.

Judging by the maneuvering, the stakes and the lobbyist registrations, this amazingly complex issue actually can be reduced to two basic elements: politics and money. And there are lots of both to go around.

Let's do the politics first.

Gov. Kenny Guinn is not blind. He peers westward and sees what has happened to Gray Davis, whose presidential aspirations and very political viability may now be short-circuited by the deregulation debacle. Guinn, a former utility executive, understands the substance and the politics here and knows he cannot be inert.

Thus he mentioned the potential crisis in his State of the State address and has tried to strike a statesmanlike, deliberative pose as he has spoken out since. This is the only issue that could make Guinn vulnerable in 2002. OK, maybe, just maybe taxes, but I don't see anyone from the right with a chance.

State Sen. Randolph Townsend, who chairs the Commerce Committee and is the architect of deregulation, also need only gaze westward to see the career of his counterpart in tatters. Once considered a promising statewide contender, state Sen. Steve Peace of El Cajon recently announced he will not run for secretary of state in the midst of the energy nightmare. Townsend is now like the once-proud father who has been forced to disown his progeny.

The Democrats, too, are hardly sightless on this one -- although their myopia may be blinding them to certain realities. They sensed Guinn's vulnerability on the issue late last year and have been lobbing salvos ever since. How far will they push? What legislation will they propose? Could they muck everything up even more? Those answers will start to unfurl fairly soon.

Now for the money. The smell of lucre wafts down these hallways as lobbyists register for energy companies that want to sell power or build power plants. This is big -- make that huge -- business. Enron, which has had a presence here for a few sessions, and made $777 million in the last quarter of last year, according to Business Week, is just one of myriad suitors up here. They are all queuing up, as business interests do, to bend the system for their clients' benefit.

Some want lawmakers to do nothing. Some want them to do something. All want to make sure they can capitalize on the market -- whatever the market is.

Their interests do not necessarily coincide with the public interest, as occasionally is the case with lobbyists, you may have noticed.

The utilities also are well-represented -- and they will need every bit of juice they can muster to fight off punitive measures from a political corps responding to public outrage. Sierra Pacific's cerebral CEO, Walt Higgins, gave an impressive presentation to Townsend's committee last week. But it will take more than words and even persuasive ones to induce the Gang of 63 not to overreach, to not accomplish by legislative fiat what the market has not done.

The power (bad pun alert) of this issue cannot be underestimated. It cuts across every demographic group and every income strata -- from the casino spending $34 million annually to keep the slot machines whirring to the apartment dweller spending $34 to keep the air conditioner humming.

And that is the reason why so many politicians, from the governor on down, are trying to make all the right moves, as lobbyists try to cash in, so the lights will not go out on their careers.