CLEVELAND — When federal crimefighters turned over a rock and saw the face of Reddy Kilowatt, no one in Ohio should have been less surprised than Gov. Mike DeWine.
DeWine’s relationship with FirstEnergy Corp. dates backs to the early 1990s. He surely knew support from the Akron-based energy giant, once known to all of Northeast Ohio by that smiling Reddy Kilowatt face, always comes with a price.
It would have been the height of naiveté for DeWine to think he was incapable of being tainted by decades of catering to the dark and dirty influence of the heavy-handed electric utility. And he surely knew FirstEnergy would want something in return for the $1 million it spent on DeWine’s behalf since 2017.
Knowing the risks, DeWine nevertheless built a gubernatorial team top-heavy with FirstEnergy acolytes. And he gave FirstEnergy what it wanted – the chairmanship of the all-powerful state agency that regulates public utilities.
It was an unforced error, one with the potential to tarnish all the good DeWine did during the gravest health crisis in a century, an error that puts at some risk DeWine’s legacy and governorship.
DeWine hasn’t been personally implicated in what the former U.S. Attorney for Southern Ohio (like DeWine, a Republican) called “likely the largest money laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio.”
But it’s now indisputably clear the governor’s 2019 appointment of Sam Randazzo to the powerful post as chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio was an enormous mistake.
On July 22, FirstEnergy admitted funding a $61 million bribery scheme designed to secure passage of House Bill 6, the nuclear power plant bailout disguised as a jobs bill, that would have forced ratepayers (taxpayers) to subsidize FirstEnergy’s long history of bad management.
For FirstEnergy, buying the loyalty of state legislators has always been a bipartisan exercise. And House Bill 6 was approved with support from lawmakers from both parties and signed into law by DeWine.
Most damaging to DeWine was that, in its admission of wrongdoing, FirstEnergy said it paid a $4.3 million bribe to Randazzo weeks before DeWine named Randazzo to the powerful PUCO job.
And as detailed in a July 25 story by Plain Dealer and cleveland.com reporter Andrew J. Tobias, Justice Department documents include damning text messages between former FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones and Randazzo that provide circumstantial evidence of motives that were far less than pure.
Last year, then-House Speaker Larry Householder and four Republican operatives were indicted for their alleged roles in the bribery scam. Two of the four, Jeffrey Longstreth and Juan Cespedes, have already pleaded guilty. Another, Neil Clark, committed suicide. Householder and former Ohio Republican Party Chairman Matt Borges have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.
As of this writing, neither Jones nor Randazzo has been charged with any criminal wrongdoing.
Randazzo resigned last November, days after the FBI searched his Columbus-area home. But his tenure as PUCO chairman confirmed the worst fears of environmentalists – that he would be a shill for fossil fuel power companies and an enemy of clean energy.
Strangely, DeWine has consistently stopped short of criticizing Randazzo, at times praising him and regularly saying he was unaware of the $4.3 million payment from FirstEnergy when he named Randazzo the state’s top utility regulator.
A July 26 story by Plain Dealer and cleveland.com reporter Jeremy Pelzer quoted a DeWine spokesman saying that Randazzo had told DeWine’s then-chief of staff, Laurel Dawson, about the $4.3 million payment in late October. The spokesman said the governor did not learn of the payment until the FBI raided Randazzo’s home on Nov. 16.
In a news conference on July 26, DeWine denied FirstEnergy officials ever pushed him to appoint Randazzo.
Never was there a need for them to ask. FirstEnergy’s apologists, inside and outside the DeWine administration, did the company’s dirty work. DeWine is not a stupid man. He knew who FirstEnergy wanted for the PUCO job. A reminder from the company wasn’t necessary.
DeWine’s appointment of Randazzo was also tainted by a decision that deliberately harmed Greater Cleveland. In May 2020, DeWine was uniquely silent when the Randazzo-led Ohio Power Siting Board, comprised of various members of the governor’s administration, inserted a poison pill into its phony “approval” of a project to build six wind turbines in Lake Erie.
Support for the project was overwhelming, though not unanimous. Backers included both of the state’s U.S. senators, the Greater Cleveland congressional delegation, the Sierra Club, Cleveland Foundation, and a long list of notable Clevelanders, including prominent DeWine supporter Dick Pogue.
Prior to the Siting Board’s decision that effectively killed the project, officials of the Lake Erie Energy Development Corp. (LEEDCo) spent months negotiating with state officials. At the time, LEEDCo representatives said the governor’s office was regularly made aware of the negotiations.
LEEDCo thought it had a deal. The DeWine administration thought otherwise. “In the end, nothing mattered,” a prominent supporter of the Lake Erie proposal told me last week. “The damage was done the day DeWine appointed Randazzo.”
FirstEnergy apologists always deny any opposition to clean energy projects, dismissing them as too insignificant to harm the company’s bottom line. Then they quietly go back to work attempting to undercut anything that smacks of cleaner air. It’s the same tall tale they have long told about Cleveland Public Power, despite constantly being caught trying to sabotage the city-owned system.
Three months after the DeWine administration killed the wind turbine plan, and in the wake of the HB 6 indictments, LEEDCo President David Karpinski explained to National Public Radio, “We were fighting a losing battle here against that type of corruption.”
Facing enormous criticism, last September the Power Siting Board reversed itself, removing the poison pill provision.
But FirstEnergy’s admission that it paid a $4.3 million bribe to the man DeWine put in charge of the Public Utilities Commission and, by extension, of the state Power Siting Board will surely complicate his path to a second term as governor.
DeWine has put himself in political peril. If the indictments continue, it will only get worse. He better hope voters aren’t paying attention.
Brent Larkin was The Plain Dealer’s editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009.
To reach Brent Larkin: blarkin@cleveland.com
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