Anatomy of a Gubernatorial Appointment

On Friday morning, the Senate State Affairs Committee heard from former state senator Jeff Agenbroad of Nampa, who has been appointed to the Idaho Energy Resource Authority by Governor Brad Little. This jumped out at me when I saw it on the agenda, considering that Agenbroad is currently running against Sen. Brian Lenney, who defeated him in the 2022 primary.

I was even more intrigued when Agenbroad mentioned in his testimony before the committee that he had no experience with the energy industry. In his answer to Sen. Melissa Wintrow about what qualifications he brought to the seat, Agenbroad suggested that Governor Brad Little had chosen him due to his background in finance.

The Idaho Energy Resource Authority was established by the Legislature in 2005 in what is now Title 67, Chapter 89 of the Idaho Statutes. In giving the governor the power to appoint the board of directors, Section 8905 says:

(2)  In making appointments, the governor shall endeavor to appoint individuals with direct professional experience and demonstrated knowledge in the electric utility industry. In addition to representatives of investor-owned, electric cooperative or municipal utilities, the governor may also appoint individuals with expertise in fields related to the functions of the authority such as engineering, banking, finance, economics and law.

Idaho Statute 67-8905

As you can see, appointing someone whose background is finance, rather than energy, is not entirely unusual. Also, despite the appointment being heard in committee now, the Senate journal indicates that the appointment from Gov. Little was made on October 10, 2023, shortly before Agenbroad announced his campaign. It’s a little bit fishy, especially considering how IACI announced their endorsement of Agenbroad before he had officially announced his own candidacy the week of November 13.

Nevertheless, there is nothing here that seems obviously out of place. However, digging into this appointment revealed the depths of the Idaho political establishment and how intertwined the state bureaucracy is with big corporations and even trillion dollar investment firms such as Blackrock.

According to the Office of Energy and Mineral Resources, the landscape of energy in Idaho is vast, consisting of natural resources, private companies, cooperatives, municipal utilities, and government agencies.

Like most publicly traded companies in the United States, the top two shareholders of Avista and IdaCorp (Idaho Power’s parent company) are Blackrock and Vanguard, which both use their tremendous leverage to push ESG and DEI policies through the corporate world. Despite these corporations being technically private, they are extremely intertwined with government agencies that both regulate the energy industry as well as facilitate its growth.

I think it’s fair to say that there is not really a free market in the energy sector. The barrier to entry is high —you can’t simply start a competing electricity provider in your garage —and most municipalities have granted a monopoly to a single company. Electricity is so important to our way of life that governments have taken interest in making sure that consumers have uninterrupted access.

Whether this is how it should be is a debate for another time. Suffice it to say, right now it is what it is. The result of this blurring the line between public and private means that government has a lot of power over the industry but also quasi-private corporations such as Avista and Idaho Power have a lot of influence over the government as well. This is something that should concern all of us, as it was the energy and natural resources that made the Gem State great in the first place. We should know who controls them, and to what ends.

According to the act creating the Idaho Energy Resource Authority (IERA), its purpose is “to encourage and promote the development of clean energy resources in order to develop reliable, economic, and long-term sources of energy supply, promote efficiencies in the generation, storage, transmission, and utilization of electric energy, and enhance the long-term stability of the energy resources and requirements of the state.”

The IERA has a website, however it was not easy to find. Though they list Jeff Agenbroad as a member of the board of directors, despite him still awaiting confirmation by the Senate, they have not posted their minutes in more than two years. The most recent minutes record the meeting of June 3, 2021, in which the board of the IERA agreed to issue hundreds of millions of dollars of bonds for electrical infrastructure under the auspices of the Bonneville Power Association.

Whether or not this transaction is good or bad is beside the point — I’m sure it will be beneficial to the people of Idaho, and the board is acting within their authority as granted by the Legislature in 2005. I mention it to illustrate how much goes on outside of the notice both of voters and the lawmakers we elect. There are 180 state agencies in Idaho, but that doesn’t include smaller boards like the IERA, so the total number of governmental authorities could well be ten times that. Is there any one person who understands them all? Our part time legislators certainly don’t have the time to review and audit every single one, yet they are out there, spending money, crafting regulations, and nudging private enterprise in one direction or another.

The bureaucracy is a self-perpetuating system, a perpetual motion machine that has taken on a life of its own outside the purview of our elected representatives. “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy,” as the saying goes. How does one begin to reform such a system? How can we possibly return to a limited government when the state has its tentacles so firmly entwined in so many areas of society?

The only thing we can do is continue shining lights on these things and bringing information to voters and lawmakers alike. If something needs changed or reformed, then let’s make it happen, but first we have to know what’s going on.

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