The Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) changed its name to the Iowa Utilities Commission (IUC) on July 1, as part of a state government reorganization that removed the IUB from the Department of Commerce.
What now needs to change is the terrible and myopic policy decisions the IUB has made over the past few years.
The IUC regulates the rates and services of public utilities that provide water, sanitary sewage, or storm water drainage. The IUC also regulates investor-owned electric, natural gas, and water utilities, as well as municipal electric and natural gas utilities and electric cooperatives.
The most recent irresponsible policy decision was granting Summit Carbon Solutions, a private company, a permit for their proposal to transport pressurized carbon dioxide from ethanol plants to underground storage in North Dakota. The commission decided the public benefits from the projects and granted eminent domain powers to a private company to lay pipe across Iowa land it doesn’t own.
While final approval is contingent on the state of South Dakota also approving the pipeline through the use of eminent domain — which seems doubtful because of a recent court decision — this remains truly bad policy.
To be clear, ethanol is very important to the future of Iowa’s economic landscape, but taking private property through the use of eminent domain for private business gain is simply bad public policy, and the argument that not allowing this will negatively impact the ethanol industry is overblown.
Private property rights are a foundational bedrock of America’s economy. Once that starts eroding, then what comes next? Consider the following text that the United States uses to influence other countries on the need for strong private property rights.
“Clear, secure, and negotiable rights to land and property are an essential foundation for economic growth-friendly enabling environments,” the U.S. Agency for International Development’s website says. “When property rights are protected, people, groups, and businesses make forward-looking investments because they are more confident that they will capture future returns from their efforts. Research shows that an improved property-rights environment leads to new investments and businesses allocating resources more effectively, which, in turn, leads to more robust growth.”
The IUC also is charged with being environmentally responsible and providing reliable utility service, as well as being a regulatory expert and solutions-oriented partner regarding current and emerging utility matters.
Perhaps, then, the IUB forgot about these important vision and mission components when it allowed the Duane Arnold Energy Center, Iowa’s only nuclear power plant, to be shut down and decommissioned. It marked one of the most inept and short-sighted public policy decisions in the past half century. And now just a few years after it started the decommissioning process, there is a study of the possibility of restarting DAEC.
The regulatory body has a new name. Let’s hope it takes a new approach to future important public policy decisions.
