The congressional debate over electricity restructuring so farhas focused on whether its should be done as comprehensivelegislation or as piecemeal reform of the Public Utility HoldingCompany Act (PUHCA), but a third option may be tossed into the fraysoon.

If the Senate passes PUHCA reform next month, as is expected, acouple of House members have said they will draft what’s beingcalled “a deregulatory-light kind of bill, where you’ll end uphaving PUHCA as the primary vehicle and then you’ll have smallderegulatory pieces added to it, maybe [reform of the PublicUtility Regulatory Policies Act], maybe a Federal Power Actamendment,” said Fred Wendorf, director of federal affairs forCentral and South West Corp., an investor-owned utility in Dallas,TX, that is subject to PUHCA.

Commitments for such legislation have been made by Reps. W.J.”Billy” Tauzin (R-LA), Michael G. Oxley (R-OH), Joe Barton (R-TX) and other House lawmakers, he told a conference in Washington D.C.Monday jointly sponsored by the Energy Council and the InterstateOil and Gas Compact Commission. The three lawmakers are members ofthe Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over electricrestructuring legislation in the House.

He seriously doubts the comprehensive restructuring legislationproposed by Rep. Dan Schaefer (R-CO), chairman of the Commerce’sEnergy and Power Subcommittee, has a prayer of passing the House.”I personally don’t think that Mr. Schaefer’s got the vote…to getsomething out of his [subcommittee]. They’ve been trying, tryingand trying; it’s just not happening. You’ve got another factor inthere, which is the environmental piece” that’s working againstcomprehensive legislation, Wendorf said. “If anything moves [inCongress], you’re going to have a White House trying to put a veryhard environmental piece on the bill,” which could be its deathknell.

Although Wendorf is “pretty confident” Sen. Alfonse D’Amato’sPUHCA reform legislation will be favorably voted on by the Senatesoon – “we have a commitment from [Senate Majority Leader TrentLott (R-MS) to bring it to the floor of the Senate in April” – hehas misgivings about whether the entire Congress will pass such abill this year. “The problem that we’re having is it’s verydifficult to get anything done in this Congress. They are in a verygo-slow mode, and they’ve also tied in the larger decontrol phase.”

The biggest opponents of stand-alone PUHCA reform are industrialpower users and public power groups, such as rural co-operatives,Wendorf noted. But they are opposed to it for different reasons.The industrial consumers’ “reasoning is that if you let PUHCA go byitself, you will loose the motivation” to restructure other aspectsof the electric industry. And the public power groups “fear that ifPUHCA goes by itself, it will drag other pieces of the legislationwith it. Therefore, they’re out there trying to stop us.”

Stand-alone PUHCA reform’s biggest supporters are the 16electric and natural gas companies that are registered holdingcompanies. Some of these companies include Columbia Gas SystemInc., the Southern Companies and Central and South West Corp. As aresult of PUHCA, “we have to go to the SEC currently to ask thempermission to do practically anything we want to do that’s barelyrelated to our [energy] business.”

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