CPUC member sorry for 'serious mistakes’ in judge-shopping case

One member of the California Public Utilities Commission publicly apologized Thursday for “very serious mistakes” he made in the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. judge-shopping case, but the commission’s president was silent on his role in the affair.

The scandal erupted last month, when PG&E fired three executives and commission President Michael Peevey’s chief of staff resigned. The aide, Carol Brown, had promised a PG&E vice president that she would try to get his preferred administrative law judge appointed to a $1.3 billion rate case, e-mails released by PG&E showed.

One of Peevey’s colleagues on the five-member utilities commission, Mike Florio, told the PG&E vice president in an e-mail that he would “do what I can on this end” to “bump” a judge the executive didn’t want on the case.

That promise was a surprise to many who had followed Florio’s three-decade career as a staff attorney at The Utility Reform Network, a consumer watchdog group. Many were also astounded that Florio said he hadn’t known he was violating utilities commission rules against back-channel communications with utilities that the state agency regulates.

At the commission’s meeting in San Francisco on Thursday, the first since PG&E released the e-mails, Florio repeated apologies that he had already voiced to reporters.

'Rebuild credibility’

“All I can do at this point is pledge that I will do everything I can to rebuild the credibility and trust, and our commitment to the process and the work we do,” Florio said.

He said he had made “some very serious mistakes ... in the content and the excessive candor of my e-mail exchanges with PG&E,” and added, “I want to assure everyone that such communications are something that I have not engaged in before and certainly will never do so again.”

In the e-mails, Florio told then-PG&E Vice President Brian Cherry that he was “horrified” at the news that administrative law Judge Douglas Long had initially been assigned to the rate case, which will determine how much PG&E customers must pay for gas-pipeline improvements the utility began after the 2010 San Bruno explosion.

Judge 'a problem’

Cherry had labeled Long “a problem” for PG&E, and Florio wrote in an e-mail that the judge was too slow to decide cases and unwilling to “take direction.”

A statement attributed to the “overwhelming majority” of the agency’s judges said Thursday that they found “the reported judge-shopping efforts repugnant and inexcusable.”

Florio said he had apologized to Long and to Judge John Wong, whom Cherry had lobbied to be assigned to the case.

“Today, I want to further extend that apology to my colleagues and especially the entire commission staff and the public we serve,” Florio said.

Wong was given the case in January, then was removed last month after the e-mails were released. Judge Amy Yip-Kikugawa now has the case.

President mum

Peevey, the commission president, did not mention the scandal directly Thursday. He did say that at a conference of lawyers who argue cases before the commission, he had been asked about “my deportment here at the commission in the context of, 'You’re an activist president, always pushing the commission to do things.’”

There has been speculation that the fired PG&E executives, including Cherry, were seeking to make the company’s backing for a pet project of Peevey’s conditional to a decision to assign Wong to the rate case. That project, a coal gasification plant near Bakersfield whose carbon-dioxide emissions would be buried in an oil field, is still in the planning stages.

'Doomed our future’

On Thursday, Peevey noted a recent report that more than half of Earth’s wildlife has disappeared in the last 40 years. He said that fuels his passion for environmental projects that reduce greenhouse gases.

Without the “moral imperative here to deal with this, ” he said, “we have doomed our future.”

“That is what motivates me,” said Peevey, whose latest six-year term is up in December. “To try to be the activist leader of this commission, that is what motivates me more than anything else.’’

Jaxon Van Derbeken is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jvanderbeken@sfchronicle.com