The Weekend Wonk: Tangled Web of Utility Corruption

So, if you are not familiar with the First Energy scandal, sometimes called the SB6 scandal in Ohio, you can start with this post.
The TLDR is that First Energy, a big utility that serves parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, and West Virginia was central to the largest corruption and racketeering case in Ohio history, which has recently sent the former Speaker of the Ohio House to jail for 20 years, and likewise the Chair of the Ohio GOP for 5 years.
Part of what First Energy got for their bribe was the passage of HB6, a bill that required Ohio ratepayers to subsidize uneconomical nuclear and coal plants.

Let’s introduce some of the players.

Currently under indictment is Sam Randazzo, an attorney and former Chair of PUCO – the Public Utility Commission of Ohio. And here’s what piques my interest.

Not long before his appointment to PUCO, Mr Randazzo shared a stage with, and showered praise on, one Kevon Martis, who is a Senior Fellow at fossil fuel lobbying firm E&E Legal, and a very active opponent of clean energy across Michigan, the Midwest, and beyond for the last dozen or so years.

While calling Mr Martis a “hero” who “inspires me quite often”.
Randazzo’s remarks included the obligatory disclaimer we often hear from clean energy opponents, “I’m not paid by the Koch Brothers, in fact, I’m lucky to get anything in the way of payment.”

Below, brief, 1:46 clip from a Cleveland news report about Mr Randazzo’s indictment on, among other things, charges of taking 4 million dollars in bribes from First Energy, for services rendered as PUCO chair.

So, I’ve mentioned Mr Martis’ colorful connections before, but what’s interesting now is that, following the passage of massively ambitious clean energy legislation by Governor Gretchen Whitmer and the Michigan Legislature, Martis has been spearheading a petition drive to repeal one of the most critical components – siting reform for clean energy. Across Michigan, clean energy projects have been under attack by mobs, driven by Q-anon level disinformation and cultish intensity, who abuse, harass, and sometimes physically threaten, farmers, landowners and local boards – often with Mr Martis direction in the background.
The reform is meant not just to encourage more clean energy, but also to protect farmer’s property rights, which have been trampled as Facebook frenzied conspiracists run roughshod over weak, underfunded local boards.

After passage of the new energy bills, Martis went to work on a ballot campaign seeking to overturn the siting reform, in particular.

When a Facebook page was set up to support that effort a few months ago, sharp eyed journalists noticed some completely unsurprising connections.

Energy and Policy:

A new group formed by anti-wind and solar activists in Michigan has teamed up with a Republican political consulting firm that also represents an oil and gas pipeline company to fight legislation that would make it easier to site and build renewable energy projects in the state.

Our Home, Our Voice (OHOV) is a 501(c)(4) organization incorporated in the State of Michigan earlier this year. 

“Our Home, Our Voice is a pure grassroots coalition of local officials and private citizens dedicated to protecting Michigan’s long-standing right of local regulation of land use,” Kevon Martis, OHOV’s co-founder and a long-time anti-wind activist, said last month in a presentation to the Michigan House Energy, Communications and Technology Committee. 

“OHOV is funded entirely by rural residents and receives no industry support of any kind,” Martis’s presentation also said. 

A visit to the “About” page for OHOV’s private Facebook group revealed that the group’s admins and moderators include Lucy Cornwell and Emily Van Camp, both of whom are listed as employees of the Marketing Resource Group (MRG), a public relations firm in Lansing that’s represented the Wolverine Pipe Line Company for more than twenty years. 

Wolverine Pipe Line Co. is jointly controlled by the Mobil Pipe Line Company, Sunoco Pipeline L.P., and several smaller companies, according to an annual report filed with federal regulators in April by Mobil Pipe Line, which is a unit of ExxonMobil. Energy Transfer also lists Wolverine Pipe Line Co. as a subsidiary in SEC filings. 

OHOV is opposing legislation – House Bills 5120 and 5121– recently passed by Democrats in the Michigan House that would help streamline development of renewable energy projects by providing the Michigan Public Service Commission with more control over approval of new wind and solar farms. Democrats said the bills were amended prior to the Michigan House vote to allow for more local control over renewable energy projects in order to address local concerns. 

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The “Our Home, Our Voice” (OHOV) initiative includes a petition drive to support a ballot measure that would repeal the newly passed siting reforms, under the banner of local control. The reform law provides that if clean energy developers and local boards can’t come to an agreement after 4 months of negotiations, the issue goes up to the Michigan Public Service Commission, a 3 person board appointed by the Governor.Thus, farmer’s property rights are protected, and communities have ample time to weigh in and address reasonable concerns. OHOV thus frames its messaging as “restoring local control”.

Worth noting – under Governor Whitmer’s siting reform, no farmer or landowner will ever have to host a wind or solar facility if they don’t affirmatively seek to do so, and negotiate a fair lease, from developers. Their rights to use their property to diversify their income and in many cases, save the family farm from sprawl development, are protected.

It’s no surprise then, to see the “anti” group in bed with a pipeline company, because pipelines remain a type of project that takes advantage of “Eminent Domain” laws, that allow them to override landowners or local officials and build wherever they want to – so the massive Tell about Mr Martis’ “Local Control” talking point, is the repeal language address only Solar, wind, and battery storage, studiously avoiding the pipeline companies that will retain absolute power to build anywhere.

Having been to counties all over the midwest where clean energy is an issue, and farmers are eager to opt in, there are usually, somewhere in the background, real estate developers equally eager to watch farms fail, and see rural lands as ripe and ready to be paved over with gas stations, strip malls, burger joints, and sprawl.

No surprise then, that, in at least one telling of Mr Martis’ own radicalization as a born-again fossil fuel advocate, there is a history of disappointed real estate ambitions.

Distilled:

Martis declined to be interviewed for this story. In an email to HEATED and Distilled, he expressed offense at being described as an opponent of clean energy. “Objective ‘journalists’ don’t lead with insulting pejorative phrases like ‘opposition to clean energy,’” he wrote. At the bottom of the email he added “#fail #bias”. 

But according to multiple residents of his small town in Michigan and a former local government official, Martis’s anti-renewable crusade began as a relatively mundane personal dispute. John Tuckerman, a Lenawee County Commissioner from 2003 to 2015 who has known Martis for more than a decade, said Martis was running a small construction company in Riga, Michigan in 2010, and wanted to rezone a part of the town to build new homes.

But Martis was overruled by the town planning commission, Tuckerman said, and shortly afterwards the commission approved plans for a wind energy project on the land.

“He was angry,” said Tuckerman.

Shortly thereafter, in 2011, Martis and a group of people in town formed Interstate Informed Citizens Coalition (IICC), a nonprofit dedicated to fighting clean energy projects. Martis’s co-founder at IICC, Joshua Nolan, represented Martin County Coal Corporation in a lawsuit that same year.

Disinformation was a key part of IICC’s strategy from the beginning. As a part of their first campaign, the group bought a TV ad that claimed a proposed wind farm in southeast Michigan could “harm your families’ health, significantly reduce property values, and damage TV and radio signals, possibly depriving your family of important safety alerts.” 

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Mr Martis has a wide circle of interesting associations, as I have documented in this video, including Ryan Kelly, former gubernatorial candidate in Michigan who was sent to prison for his role in the January 6 insurrection.
Mr Kelly shared a podium with Martis at an anti-clean energy rally in 2022, in Trufant Michigan.

Fossil fuel interests hope to make the purported evils of clean energy transition into an election issue this year, both at the national and state levels.
Their tactics, and their messengers, deserve a higher level of scrutiny than the mainstream press has been giving them thus far.