As he prepares for his final two meetings as Oklahoma’s longest-serving statewide elected official and the nation’s longest-serving utility regulator, Corporation Commissioner Bob Anthony reflected critically on what has happened over the years at the Commission.
On Friday, January 3, he filed an opinion describing some of what has changed and what hasn’t during his six terms as an Oklahoma Corporation Commissioner. He also released a press notice about his filing. As has been his approach throughout his tenure, he shares credit for agency accomplishments and does not pull punches describing agency failures.
Anthony was the first Republican in sixty years to assume a seat on the Commission in January 1989. According to his filing, Anthony introduced the OCC to the fax machine and became the first commissioner to use a personal computer for work. He applied principles from his retail business background as CEO of the C.R. Anthony Company to improve customer service and modernize management practices at the OCC.
Anthony also describes several regulatory reforms he championed during his tenure, including modernizing telephone service, bringing high-speed internet to rural communities, deregulating intrastate trucking and natural gas delivery, facilitating horizontal oil and gas drilling and wind power, and cleaning up oil field pollution.
Diminishing press coverage of the Commission’s activities over the years has allowed the agency to make its activities less transparent, Anthony says. In 2024, the OCC Commissioners held fewer open, public voting meetings than at any time in documented history. “The vast majority of OCC business is now conducted behind closed doors,” Anthony writes. “The consequences of this behavior for the public and their monthly utility bills are self-evident.”
The lack of news coverage has led to uncontested reelection campaigns for OCC commissioners whose record in office hardly ever faces public scrutiny, Anthony says.
Anthony specifically laments that for the most expensive vote in agency history – when in April 2023 his fellow Commissioners Todd Hiett and Kim David voted 2-1 to approve more than $6 billion of OG&E, ONG and PSO’s 2021 fuel costs, including the historically high prices paid during the February 2021 Winter Storm – news coverage was scant. “I filed the longest dissenting opinion of my career – more than 200 pages – detailing how the orders were approved without conducting the required, lawful prudence reviews,” Anthony writes, followed by “Crickets.” indicating the lack of attention the historic event received.
Public corruption and ethics have figured prominently in Anthony’s career and do in his Reflections as well. His efforts to combat the former and promote the latter are summarized, and he laments how his decades-long efforts to promote a cultural shift away from regulatory capture have recently been undermined at the agency. He specifically cites the failure of his fellow commissioners to lead by example and again accuses recent commissioners of “dereliction of duty.” He also cites an October 2024 change to the OCC’s Ethics Policy, eliminating language about maintaining “not only the reality, but the appearance of honesty, integrity and impartiality.”
“If, in the last few years, it only felt like the OCC was moving backwards into the old culture of regulatory capture and wrongdoing, this Ethics Policy change seemingly made it official,” Anthony writes. He also describes earlier changes to strengthen the OCC’s rules for prudence reviews of utility company fuel costs that were “bypassed” during the agency’s reviews of the 2021 Winter Storm costs.
Anthony notes how the one-party system that enabled public corruption to flourish under Democrat control when he first arrived at the Commission in the late 1980s seems to have returned under the current one-party Republican domination of state government. “Blind party loyalty does not engender good government,” Anthony writes. He cites “eternal vigilance” as an essential principle of his public service, and says repeatedly that the duties of his office to “correct abuses” are “required by law, not optional.”
“Being a Corporation Commissioner is not a part-time job,” Anthony writes in an apparent jab at the work attendance records of his fellow commissioners. He says he makes no apologies for his early efforts to “root out public corruption at the OCC” or his “recent attempts to uncover and share the truth about agency failures” including the February 2021 Winter Storm and what he calls “the $5 billion ratepayer-backed bond fiasco.”
A former Air Defense Artillery officer, Anthony says he still hopes the OCC’s failure to help Fort Sill meet a 2020 Directive from the U.S. Secretary of the Army involving the security, resilience and reliability of the fort’s power supply can be corrected. “Will lives be lost on the battlefield if the power goes out at Fort Sill?” Anthony asks. “The OCC can still correct this failure. New commissioners may bring a new willingness to act. I pray they do – soon.”
Anthony thanks his family members for their support of his public service, including his wife of 50 years, Nancy. Of the longtime members of his office staff (numbering only three executive assistants and six administrative aides in 36 years), Anthony says that, “their longevity is just as, if not more, remarkable than mine.”
“My record is long and imperfect,” Anthony concludes, but says he “can say before God and the citizens who elected” him that he fulfilled his oath of office “to the best of my ability.”
“After all the opportunities the State of Oklahoma has given me and my family over the last 100+ years, it has been an honor and a privilege to be able to serve,” Anthony writes.
Read Commissioner Anthony’s full opinion here:
https://public.occ.ok.gov/WebLink/DocView.aspx?id=17388334