Only minutes after an announcement that the California Public Utilities Commission would fine the state’s largest utility company $1.6 billion for violating state and federal gas pipeline safety standards, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said it would not appeal the decision.

PG&E, however, never said why it is happy to accept the largest penalty ever assessed by regulators against an American utility company.

Opaque Appearance

Maybe because the fine, in reality, is not quite half as large as it looks, mostly a cosmetic move by a regulatory commission desperate to restore its image after many months of scandal, with at least two criminal investigations in process.

This so-called fine fits with what industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie observed early in the last century: “As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.”

Here is why this fine is less than half as large as it looks:

The “penalty” is split into four parts: $400 million to be refunded to customers, $300 million going into the state’s general fund and $50 million to pay for a variety of PUC safety activities. More than 53 percent of the money – $850 million – will be spent to repair and improve PG&E’s gas transmission system.

Huh? How is it a fine when PG&E spends money on needed pipeline maintenance and improvements? Remember, for more than six decades, the company has collected payments monthly from each of its natural gas customers to maintain pipeline safety.

The total comes to billions of dollars. No one knows just how many billions. Because the utilities commission did not track how this money was used until after the fatal 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion, no one knows how much was actually spent to fix or replace pipelines.

The Public Utilities Commission did find recently that PG&E used at least some maintenance money for executive salaries and bonuses. Commissioners did not respond when asked why the $850 million in pipeline repairs should be considered a penalty rather than a business expense.

As Mr. Carnegie suggested long ago, watch what the Public Utilities Commission does, not what it says. Each one of the corrupt-seeming rulings for which it is now being investigated by the FBI and the state attorney general’s office was couched in terms at least as pious as the announced “fine” of PG&E.

One example of the Public Utilities Commission misleading utility customers: The commission said last fall that it painstakingly reached a “compromise” settlement in which customers of Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Co. will pay $3.3 billion – more than two-thirds of the cost – for retiring the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, even though the retirement was caused by Edison decisions the company knew in advance were flawed.

Is This Fair?

Customers, though, had been dunned monthly for the eventual retirement of San Onofre since the early 1970s. Documents seized from the home of former Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey show he arranged the essence of the settlement with an Edison executive during a junket to Poland one year before the settlement was announced.

The PG&E fine is equally misleading, even though it was accompanied by an announcement from current President Michael Picker that he’s ordering an investigation into whether PG&E “is simply too large…to succeed at safety.”

The bottom line is that PG&E collected many billions over many years for maintaining its pipelines.

Federal investigators, however, found after San Bruno that the company was criminally negligent in its maintenance practices – and that the PUC did not police it adequately.

At least some of the money went to corporate executives and the fate of the rest is unknown.

PG&E now has to spend money to fix or renew its pipeline system, really an ordinary cost of doing business, one for which its customers paid long ago. How is this a fine?

The answer is that it is not, or the PUC would answer questions about it. Rather, this “fine” is a public relations ploy. Which emphasizes that in dealing with the Public Utilities Commission and PG&E, it is wise to bear in mind what 1970s-era Manager Billy Martin said of baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson and New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner: “One’s a born liar and the other’s been (indicted).”

Mr. Elias may be contacted at tdelias@aol.com. His book, “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,” is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net