In Tallahassee today, a decision set to be made by a normally obscure committee will tell whether hope remains for the legislative process, or whether it has become so corrupt and contemptuous that members no longer even pretend to care what the public thinks.
The five senators and five House members of the Joint Legislative Auditing Committee will interview and choose among the three remaining candidates to succeed Jack Shreve as public counsel.
By law, the public counsel is the state's consumer advocate on public utility issues. So everyone who has a telephone or purchases electricity, gas or water from a private utility has a stake in today's decision.
So, obviously, do the utility companies, who appear to have already had entirely too much influence with the committee. That was obvious last month when Shreve's highly qualified deputy and acting successor, Charlie Beck, didn't make the cut.
Two of the five finalists subsequently withdrew, leaving only one with a plausible entitlement to the job. He is Harold McLean, retired general counsel for the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) and a former associate public counsel under Shreve.
The other candidates are James R. Kelly, director of the division of consumer services in the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, who has no relevant experience with utility regulation, and Donald Rubottom, a policy aide to House Speaker Johnnie Byrd, who has no experience of any kind in anything to do with consumer protection and whose presence on the short list owes entirely to his powerful patron.
With the largest telephone rate increases in Florida's history pending before the PSC, you can bet that the telephone companies have their campaign contributions - to Byrd's Senate campaign, among others - riding on Rubottom.
Rep. Kevin C. Ambler, R-Lutz, is the only Tampa Bay area legislator on the joint committee. How he votes today will be the measure of the man.
