What are the PUC Commissioners doing all Month?
Best as I can tell, some reading and 4 meetings
I want to stress that I asked all three Commissioners if they would be willing to discuss what they do. I wanted to give them a chance to speak to this question. All three declined.1
What are the Commissioners doing all month in their full-time gig? To start, there are a lot of documents filed for their proceedings. So for each weekly meeting they have a lot of reading to do. So 2 - 3 hours/week for that.
And then we have their weekly meeting. These are on YouTube and take 1 - 1½ hours each week.
One weird thing about these meetings - they often involve a PUC staff member reading out the relevant information for 3+ minutes prior to each vote. If that is truly the first time the Commissioners are learning this, it’s way too complicated to on the run fully understand to then vote. On the flip side, if they’ve read it in advance, why read it out again?
And then from their agendas for March 20252 we also have:
Commissioners' Deliberations Minutes from 03-13-2025 CDM
And that’s it. You can find this for yourself by going to their electronic filings and enter a search as follows:3
The law requires they disclose discussions with each other and with PUC staff if they involve jurisdictional or regulated matters.4 The lack of any documentation of meetings like this leads me to believe they aren’t happening.5
They don’t have the list of meetings with outside interests for 2025 on their website yet so we have to use 2024. In 2024 Chairman Blank had 5½ meetings/month and the other two basically none. So a little over 1/week for Blank - call that 4 hours.
To dig in further I asked for their calendars via a CORA request.6 You can see the calendars for yourself if you wish - they’re for February 2025 (below).
Commissioner Blank’s calendar is reasonably busy.7 I obviously can’t speak to what goes on in each meeting but it looks like he is putting in the time. And the blank spots on the calendar? Reasonable for time needed to read all the incoming reports and other documents.
As to the others. First let’s look at Gilman:
Many days 1 meeting, some days none.
She has several half and one full day meetings described as “busy” so I assume personal time.
And now Plant:
Many days 1 meeting
Most days has 2:00 - 4:00 as “busy” so I assume personal time.
Compared to Commissioner Blank they’re putting in what, maybe 20% of the effort. As they always vote with Chairman Blank, maybe there’s no incentive for them to actually put in the effort.
And if the various “busy” blocks on the calendar are truly personal time, their schedule shows them putting in maybe half days most of the time.
Work From Home
The Commissioners have one of their weekly meetings in person. So they come to the office 1 day/month. It’s not clear if they spend all of that day at the office, or just the meeting as that is not tracked.
Ok, government is different than business - very true. But I think some things are similar if not universal. There are managers & workers. Workers do great being left alone and so work from home has great advantages for them. Managers spend a large part of their day in meetings and so work from home tends to be less effective.
This is not an absolute. There are advantages in workers having an impromptu conversation while grabbing a soda from the fridge. There are advantages in managers having heads down work time. It’s a trade-off.
In addition, there was inertia when we first went to remote work during COVID. All the employees had interpersonal relationships with others at the job. Those informal relationships are gigantic. As employees leave and new employees come on, you now have fewer of these relationships.
This is all a long way of saying that working at the office one day/month is almost certainly sub-optimal. At a minimum have a weekly lunch with socializing time for the Commissioners, Director, and the Director’s direct reports. And invite 5 random employees to each.
The Big Question
Anyways, to circle back, what are Commissioners Gilman & Plant doing all day long? Even if their role is to vote as Blank does,8 they should study the issues so they can try to persuade Blank to amend the resolution and/or change his vote.9
Maybe we should change how commissioners are appointed so we get three independent individuals who are willing to put in the time to get the job done.
It is totally legit that they declined to speak to me.
Provided via CORA request.
Yes the “*agenda” is weird but that’s what works per CORA answer.
Government agencies in Colorado tend to follow disclosure rules. We’re not Louisiana.
The PUC staff has been very responsive to my CORA requests. A+ service.
He’s in the PUC book club - that’s cool.
I’m not saying they are supposed to vote as Blank does. But they always do match his vote which statistically makes their independence questionable at the least.
Commissioners Gilman & Plank - if you’ve ever disagreed with Chairman Blank in a weekly meeting, please provide the date and time in the video. I’ll then post a correction here and reference the meeting video.