For the past 25 years, Shreve has been Florida's public counsel - the people's lawyer in utility regulation cases.
He has literally put hundreds of millions of dollars back into the pockets of Floridians that otherwise would have ended up as utility profits. With a small, modestly paid staff, he has fought, beaten and wrung concessions out of the biggest corporate powers in Florida, despite all their political clout and their high-powered lawyers.
It is possible that in terms of sheer dollars, no other single person has done as much good for the people of Florida.
Now time is up.
Even under the state's delayed retirement program, Shreve, who turns 71 in July, has to leave office June 30. He has been burning unused "vacation" time while coming into work each day. Still, he will give up a couple more months of unused time when he retires.
Shreve belongs to a passing generation of Florida political figures who grew up dedicating themselves to creating a better state. They came of age in the '60s and '70s, pushed the old, rural "Pork Chop Gang" out of power in the Legislature, and wrote a new state Constitution.
But while others found glory as governors and senators, Shreve took a detour into a career as a permanent underdog on the consumer's behalf, an ever-hopeful tilter against mighty windmills.
On Monday, his final day on the job, his office is scheduled for a showdown with Progress Energy Florida Inc. of St. Petersburg in front of the Florida Public Service Commission. Shreve wants Progress to cough up more refunds and to force the company's CEO to answer his questions.
Seems like a fitting way to go out.
As for what happens after that, Shreve is at a complete loss.
"I don't have any plans at this point," he says with a sigh. His tennis game is shot because of a bad rotator cuff. His wife of 42 years, Alice, passed away three years ago. He has no other interests besides work.
"Maybe I'll keep showing up here until they run me off."
Most people have no choice about their electric, gas or local telephone company. Nor do they have any choice when their home is served by a private water utility.
This has been a dilemma since the days of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. In capitalism, it is a free marketplace with competition that keeps prices down. But how do you control a monopoly utility?
Florida, like other states, chose government regulation as a stand-in for the free market. Florida has a Public Service Commission, a five-member panel appointed by the governor.
The job of public counsel was added in 1974. It was a time of energy crisis and sky-high inflation. But the customers had no voice all their own in utility cases.
Shreve is Florida's fourth public counsel, taking over in 1978, but he is the only man to hold the job since the state switched to an appointed PSC the following year. (Before then the PSC was elected.)
He works for the Legislature. His job is up for renewal every year. He has a staff of 15, including six lawyers, and a budget of $2.5-million last year. He often returns unspent money to the treasury. He forbids his staff from taking as much as a free cup of coffee.
As a practical matter, Shreve has survived not by being a bomb-throwing publicity hound, but a mild-mannered compromiser. His demeanor is Jimmy Stewart-ish, or sometimes Columbo.
It took him 16 years to hold his first press conference.
"It could have been a real political office," Shreve said in a recent interview in his office, which overlooks the Senate side of the state Capitol. "I've tried to keep it out of politics. I think our credibility is the biggest asset we have."
The state's biggest electric company, Florida Power & Light Co. of Miami, reached a settlement with Shreve last year to cut rates by $600-million.
That came just three years after Shreve carved $250-million a year out of FP&L, in addition to a one-time bonus refund of $200-million.
In St. Petersburg, Progress Energy (formerly Florida Power Corp.) already has agreed with Shreve to cough up $500-million, in four annual installments of $125-million. Still, Shreve is pestering the company in a dispute over an additional $18-million.
He got $300-million from BellSouth in 1994 and got the PSC to order more than $80-million from GTE, now called Verizon, soon after that. "A nice lick," he smiles, remembering rate cuts the way a baseball pitcher might remember a good game.
All of this money otherwise would have gone into utility profits, to the benefit of Wall Street instead of Main Street.
On the occasion of his retirement, though, Shreve's adversaries speak no ill of him. "At times, we've been in a very adversarial position with Jack," says Aaron Perlut, spokesman for Progress Energy Florida. "But he has always conducted himself very professionally and honestly. We have a lot of respect for him."
Shreve's challenge has been that Florida's utility laws were written in the 1970s, when the standard model was a constant upward pressure on rates. Who the heck could have known that for the following two decades, rates should have been coming down?
Florida has no mechanism for reducing rates automatically as conditions warrant. Somebody has to kick, drag and goad the process into action. The PSC proved to be extremely reluctant to enter into full-fledged rates cases, even though inflation and interest rates had dropped.
"We had a real problem getting rates back down when it was over," Shreve says.
A few critics suggest that Shreve has been too timid - or at least, that the nature of his office keeps him on too short a leash.
The Legislature, which gets big campaign contributions from utilities, can fire him in a heartbeat. Besides, his one-year term is awfully short.
Michael Twomey of Tallahassee is a former PSC staff lawyer and now a well-known critic of the system. He says Florida's public counsel cannot be a strong voice when the Legislature is writing laws that hurt customers.
"Because he gets his ticket punched every year," Twomey says of Shreve, "he's not in a position structurally to carry out his responsibility of representing the consumers on legislation affecting utilities."
Shreve admits that he does not oppose or support legislation: "We never lobby." If the Legislature asks, he tells lawmakers what he thinks. In 1995, they asked but paid little heed. This year, they didn't ask as much.
However, he disagrees with Twomey's assertion that the Legislature keeps the public counsel under its thumb. "I've never had any interference whatsoever in doing my job," he insists. No member has ever strong-armed him. No legislator has ever voted against renewing his job.
Even so, Shreve's tenure has included investigations into some spectacular scandals. He got in on the tail end of Florida Power's "daisy chain" scandal in the late 1970s, in which the company got caught sticking it to electric customers by jacking up the prices that its subsidiaries charged each other.
In the 1980s, it was Gulf Power of Pensacola that got caught. Gulf was showering illegal campaign contributions, travel and freebies on the Legislature. The feds investigated too. A company senior vice president died in a mysterious plane crash.
In the early 1990s, PSC member Tom Beard became infamous for dating a Southern Bell employee while setting the company's rates. The mini-scandal dragged on for a while, with Beard steadfastly insisting he had the right to do both at once. Shreve figured Beard ought to choose, and kept after him. Finally, Beard recused himself from seven pending cases that affected Bell.
"Jack asked the question, and I gave him an answer," Beard admitted grudgingly. Later he resigned from the commission altogether.
Robert Jackson Shreve was born July 24, 1932, in the north Florida town of Crestview, though his family moved to Chipley six months later. His father died when he was 6. His mother ran a seed store and sold shelled pecans.
At the University of Florida, Shreve was president of the Blue Key Society, a prestigious club that produced several future governors and state leaders. His classmates included Buddy MacKay, future lieutenant governor, and Talbot "Sandy" D'Alemberte, who recently retired as president of Florida State University.
One night, Shreve was rousted from his bed at 2 a.m. by a classmate who insisted that Shreve join his campus political party. The insistent intruder was Lawton Chiles, later Florida's governor from 1991 until his death in 1998.
After getting his undergraduate degree Shreve joined the Navy and became a pilot for four years (he met Alice while stationed in California), then returned to Gainesville for law school. His first job out of school was with a West Palm Beach law firm.
Figuring that the Space Coast during the Gemini and Apollo years was a promising place to be, Shreve moved to Brevard County in 1965. He worked as a city attorney, an assistant county attorney and a local prosecutor. Friends talked him into running for the Legislature in 1970.
"We put up cardboard signs all over the place," Shreve recalls. He spent $3,000 on the campaign and defeated an incumbent. The day he took office, his mother back in Chipley posted a handwritten sign on the door of the seed store: "Closed for the day. Gone to see Jackie sworn in."
Shreve served two terms in a young, progressive state House under speakers Dick Pettigrew and Terrell Sessums. He sponsored a landmark law that created Florida's first state-level management of its water resources. Shreve also sponsored the bill that created Florida's statewide grand jury, which investigates complicated, multicounty cases.
In 1974, Shreve ran for state insurance commissioner and treasurer, but he lost in the Democratic primary. He spent only $30,000, which might have had something to do with it - he had plenty of endorsements and not enough votes. He worked as general counsel to Secretary of State Bruce Smathers until the public counsel's job came open.
With his own time almost over, Shreve is keeping a close eye on upcoming issues affecting consumers.
Starting next year, the Office of Public Counsel will be at the table while the PSC decides whether local telephone service in Florida is "competitive" - which means local rates can go up.
As for his old rivals the electric companies, Shreve cautions against a rush to deregulation. "The rest of the country is seeing what went on in California, and with Enron," he said. "We don't need to rush out and make those same mistakes."
Lastly, there's the matter of Shreve's successor. The logical candidate (from the point of view of Twomey and other consumer advocates) is one of Shreve's assistants, 53-year-old lawyer Charlie Beck.
There are reports that the utilities might be subtly lobbying for their own candidate. This is outrageous, of course, since the job in question is the public's lawyer. Even here, though, Shreve speaks gently, saying of Beck only: "He would be a good one. Very smart. Very ethical."
How does Shreve want his 25 years to be remembered?
"One, I think honesty and ethics," he says, hesitating as he looks around his office. "And that we really always made the decisions we felt were in the best interests of the citizens.
"I think our judgment's been pretty good over the years."
