What's being described as the "pervasive" influence of PG&E with the state Public Utilities Commission extended well beyond disgraced former PUC President Michael Peevey and included other commissioners and top PUC staffers.
That's the conclusion of Bay Area political leaders, state legislators and a former PUC official who have reviewed a sampling of the 65,000 emails released by PG&E late Friday.
The tone of the emails stunned even longtime critics, who were mortified to see that PUC and PG&E officials were joking about gas pipeline safety just weeks after a natural gas blast in September 2010 killed eight people and destroyed a San Bruno neighborhood. Investigators concluded that PG&E's shoddy maintenance and flawed record-keeping, along with lax oversight by the PUC, were the key factors behind the explosion.
Michael Peevey, president of the California Public Utilities Commission.
"The PUC is now a rogue agency," Loretta Lynch, a former PUC commission president, said Saturday. "All the checks and balances that existed at the PUC have been corrupted. Peevey led that corruption."
An October 2010 email showed that less than a month after the San Bruno explosion, Brian Cherry, then PG&E's vice president, and Paul Clanon, then executive director of the PUC, joked about gas pipeline safety in a reference to a pipeline in Peevey's neighborhood in the Los Angeles County community of La Cañada Flintridge.
"There's a big line right under Mike's street. He says no more dog-walking," Clanon quipped.
Michael Peevey, president of the California Public Utilities Commission.In a jovial email, Cherry shot back: "Tell Mike he should be walking towards Descanso Gardens anyway."
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Descanso Gardens is a 150-acre botanical preserve in La Cañada Flintridge.
"It was shocking to read this email," San Bruno City Manager Connie Jackson said Saturday.
The trove of emails released by PG&E under pressure from San Bruno date back to early 2010, several months before the explosion.
"It is stunning to see the pervasive influence that PG&E had with the PUC going back that far," she said. "These are pervasive problems that have been going on for a long time."
On at least one occasion, the emails show, PG&E executives tipped off PUC officials about an important regulatory filing that the public company was planning to make with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing was about the company's general rate case proposal for raising monthly gas and electric bills for residential and business customers.
"Timothy -- FYI. I will be sending you our (SEC filing) in advance of our formal filing," Cherry said in a November 2012 email to Timothy Simon, a PUC commissioner at that time.
"It's almost as if PG&E was a Rasputin, or a Svengali, with the magic power to get the PUC to do what PG&E wanted," said state Sen. Jerry Hill, whose San Mateo County district includes San Bruno. "You have to wonder what other utilities had the same influence, had the same relationships with the PUC."
In another email the same month in regard to the same rate case, PUC Commissioner Michael Florio told Cherry that he had been assigned to supervise the proceeding.
"I did NOT ask for this!! Fortunately for all concerned, we have a good experienced administrative law judge in Tom Pulsifer," Florio wrote. "Can't you protest or something???"
In a statement sent to this newspaper Saturday, Florio acknowledged that he had acted improperly in his dealings with Cherry, whose duties also included lobbying.
"The emails released by PG&E include some messages of mine that confirm what I have already acknowledged -- that in the past I allowed a former PG&E lobbyist to become much too familiar in his interactions with me," Florio said. "For this I have already apologized. Any objective review of my voting record at this commission will demonstrate that I have shown no partiality to PG&E or any other regulated utility."
The PUC remains under intense scrutiny because skeptics believe Peevey created and then nurtured a culture of cozy relations with San Francisco-based PG&E and other utility giants in California. Peevey was appointed PUC commissioner and president in 2002 by Gov. Gray Davis and then reappointed in 2008 by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Under intense fire by his critics, Peevey stepped down in December; his 12 years in the top spot at the PUC marked the longest tenure for a PUC president.
In a May 2012 email exchange, Peevey wrote to Cherry to complain of a decision in which Peevey was on the losing side, taking the occasion to chide PG&E for not properly laying the groundwork for the vote by the five-member PUC. The commission rejected a PG&E request to bill its customers for a $9.9 million investment in San Jose-based SVTC Technologies, a solar equipment maker that went out of business in late 2012.
"Got my butt kicked today," Peevey wrote about the 3-2 vote. "Could have used some help. You need to do a better job going forward. You should have let me know if you felt it was in trouble and I could have tried a couple of things to get a third vote."
In the same email exchange, Peevey also warned Cherry, an Orinda resident, that a pet project of Peevey and PG&E involving the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was in trouble at the PUC.
In an email written in September 2011, Julie Fitch, formerly a top aide to Peevey, and now a top aide to PUC Commissioner Carla Peterman, wrote in an apologetic tone to Cherry about the Carrizo Energy Solar Farm in San Luis Obispo County.
Fitch said a blunder related to a troubled effort to secure approval for the PG&E-backed solar project should be blamed on the commission, so she was scrambling to remedy the problem.
"This is totally our fault and bungling somewhere in the chain," Fitch wrote to Cherry. "Obviously, I'd prefer that this email doesn't circulate far and wide. Thanks!"
At some point, though, it appears that all the lobbying by PG&E infuriated at least one top official at the PUC.
In an October 2013 email, Sepideh Khosrowjah, chief of staff for Commissioner Florio, blasted PG&E's Cherry for what she saw as an end run around her position in Florio's office on a rate case for natural gas transmission that is still pending before the PUC.
"This is unacceptable, disrespectful, and unprofessional," Khosrowjah wrote to Cherry and Cherry's boss, Tom Bottorff, a PG&E senior vice president. "You have been playing this game with me for too many years."
Contact George Avalos at 408-859-5167. Follow him at Twitter.com/georgeavalos.