SACRAMENTO -- Phone and energy companies and officials with business before the California Public Utilities Commission and its chairman, Michael Peevey, are helping underwrite the state Senate campaign of Peevey's wife, Carol Liu.
Industries regulated by the commission have given $88,783 to assist Liu's 2008 bid to represent a district stretching from the San Gabriel to the San Fernando valleys. The donations, made by companies, executives, trade and employee groups, subcontractors and lawyers, make up 26% of the money Liu has raised so far.
A number of Liu's utility contributors have received favorable decisions from the body that regulates them during Peevey's tenure. Others have pending business.
Sempra Energy executive Edwin Guiles has given Liu $2,000, his only donation to a state legislative candidate this decade. The money was donated in 2005 and 2006, when Guiles was chairman of Southern California Gas Co., which Sempra owns.
The PUC is currently deciding whether to grant the Gas Co. an 11% rate increase for residential customers.
Calpine Corp., an energy supplier based in San Jose, gave Liu $2,000 this year even though the company is in bankruptcy. In 2004, Peevey helped negotiate a pact in which San Diego Gas & Electric bought power from a Calpine plant in Otay Mesa. He has also led the PUC's reconsideration of electricity deregulation, which could benefit Calpine and several other energy producers that contribute to Liu.
"It is quite apparent that Ms. Liu's connection to Mike Peevey has opened a large number of fundraising doors," said Michael Shames, executive director of Utility Consumers' Action Network, a San Diego-based advocacy group. "My concern is that the regulated companies' eagerness to give money to Ms. Liu may be based upon those companies' efforts to gain access to and favoritism from her husband."
Liu, Peevey and several donors who agreed to be interviewed said her financial support from utilities stems from relationships the former state assemblywoman forged in public office, not because of Peevey's position.
Liu, a Democrat from La Cañada Flintridge who served in the Assembly from 2000 until last year, said that since her husband was appointed to the PUC in 2002, "we have made it a pact to be very careful about conflicts of interest." She said, "He's been very careful not to solicit money" from those he regulates.
