Final Comments to SCC Warn Against a Rubber Stamp

Rubber Stamp

PEC's comments to the SCC focus largely on Dominion's failure to prove "public convenience and necessity." We also comment on the Hearing Examiner's failure to address impacts to well-documented natural, historic, cultural, and scenic resources, or to address the impacts on individual landowners and communities. A Commission approval would amount to a rubber stamp for not just this case, but future transmission line cases as well.

Comment Excerpts:
"The Hearing Examiner's recommended resolution of these first-impression issues should be rejected because it would confine the Commission to rubber stamping projects that promote utility interests, at enormous cost to ratepayers, but which have not been shown to be in the public convenience and necessity."

"To accept [the Hearing Examiner's] recommendation would make a mockery of reasoned decision making and would set up Dominion's (or any other electric utility's) unilateral test as the final word on whether an application to build utility facilities is in the public convenience and necessity."