The toothless watchdog

What kind of consumer watchdog spends nearly $600,000 on a report that to show how much electricity should cost in the state, largely disregards the findings of the report and then shreds the report without the public ever seeing it?
A pretty weak one, we'd say. And one who should be replaced with a watchdog who has some teeth and is willing to use them.
Rob Tongren is Ohio's second consumers counsel, but about the only thing he has in common with the first counsel, Bill Spratley, is that both were lawyers, as the title would require. From his first day on the job until the last, Spratley understood that he was at the table to represent the interests of the millions of residential electricity consumers who would otherwise be unheard above the voices of utility lobbyists and large-volume industrial customers.
Now, it seems, the consumers counsel is just another voice seeking compromise and accommodation with the other interests, and prefers to do so outside the view of the consumers or the press.
What happened
Boston-based La Capra Associates was paid $579,000 to consult on several issues before the electricity market was deregulated in Ohio in 2001. La Capra produced a report that said Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. would enjoy a windfall of about $3.5 billion under a formula designed to compensate the company for its "stranded costs," infrastructure expenses incurred under strict regulation of utility charges.
That report wasn't made public at the time, the consumers counsel signed off on a compromise deregulation plan with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. Tongren then then changed his office's policy on retention of documents and destroyed the La Capra report.
It was released only last week, after the consultant found a copy in its files and forwarded it to Tongren.
During an Ohio Senate Public Utilities Committee meeting, Sen. Jeff Jacobson, a Dayton-area Republican, tried to excuse Tongren's refusal to release the report (and, by implication the destruction of the report) as "just what lawyers do" with their files after a case is over.
The analogy, while clever, is flawed. As the state's consumers counsel, Tongren's clients are the millions of residential electricity consumers in the state. Their taxes pay his salary. Their taxes paid for the report. Without the report, they couldn't gauge how well he had represented their interests.
When watchdogs become lapdogs, the system is broken and those millions of small customers have a right to wonder who is looking out for them.
The consumers counsel board should set Tongren free. It should find someone who is less inclined toward compromise, and who clearly understands that the files he puts together aren't his property but rather the public's.