OKLAHOMA CITY – A state lawmaker is calling for major changes to a $700 million plan to pay off the energy costs associated with the 2021 Winter Storm Uri.
Rep. Tom Gann, a Republican from Inola, released a media statement last week calling for the Oklahoma Supreme Court to invalidate some $700 million in r atepayer- backed bonds issued to cover costs incurred by Public Service Company of Oklahoma during the February 2021 winter storm.
His complains about the process echo those by former Corporation Commissioner Bob Anthony in 2024.
Gann said the payments for those bonds have been collected on the monthly bills of PSO’s customers since the bonds were issued in September 2022. They are scheduled to continue for another 17 years.
Gann, a former internal auditor for Tulsa International Airport, filed a brief in the state’s high court, saying the Oklahoma Corporation Commission failed to provide a required audit of the bonds in P SO’s most recent rate case.
He also argued PSO’s original 2021 Uri costs that were securitized into the bonds were never audited either. Gann said the audit failures are fatal in both cases, making the OCC’s orders void.
“When Oklahoma law requires an audit, the Accountancy Act says it has to be done by independent, licensed CPAs following nationally recognized standards,” Gann said. “Unbelievably, the OCC allowed the utilities to audit themselves after the winter storm. And OCC employees who are not CPAs have performed fake audits of the bonds ever since.”
Gann’s statements follow those Anothony, who termed out of the corporation commission in 2024. Anthony served on the commission from Jan. 9, 1989, until Jan. 13, 2025.
Before he left office, Anthony said the winter storm repayment plan mistreats the ratepayer.
“Whatever else it was, in my opinion, this ‘creative financing mechanism’ is not only a public policy fiasco and a budding human tragedy, it is also the l argest fleecing of the Oklahoma ratepayer in the histor y of the state,” he said.
On numerous occasions Anthony raised concerns about the way the storm’s expenses were audited. In a filing made in April of 2024, Anthony wrote that the audit was “unsigned – by any auditor, accountant, accounting firm, attorney, law firm, officer of the utility, administrator or off icial of the Corporation Commission – by anyone.”
He said the one-page audit also acknowledged it was being “provided by an unobjective party to the case with a vested interest in keeping hidden the disastrous results of the bond is suance that the OCC Public Utility Division so publicly promoted.”
“It attempts to justify its biased authorship by misrepresenting the intent of the law in its very first line, falsely claiming the OCC PUD “is required to perform audits” when the law does not even mention the OCC PUD,” Anthony wrote, adding that “ the only identified source for the numbers provided is the utility itself – again, hardly objective or independent – in reports the utility’s own PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants call ‘materially noncompliant.’” Gann’s court brief asked the court to order everything that was wrongly collected from PSO’s customers to be refunded.
He said those costs in clude $130-million and $120-million rate increases approved by the OCC in November 2023 and January 2025 and about $140 million of Winter Storm bond payments already collected as “Winter Storm Cost Recovery Rider” charges on PSO customer bills.
The Oklahoma Corporation Commission, PSO and the Attorney General’s Office have 40 days to respond.