Regulatory Services and Energy Directors
For Washington State's Utilities and Transportation Commission, Mark Vasconi is Regulatory Services Director; Deborah Reynolds is Assistant Director, Conservation and Energy Planning; and Chris McGuire is Assistant Director, Energy Regulation.
There is much going on at Washington's Utilities and Transportation Commission. Including implementation of the shiny new Clean Energy Transformation Act or CETA, requiring that state's electric utilities to transition to one hundred percent clean power by 2045. Signed into law last year, the devil is in the details, as here you hear Commission Staff grapple with the intricacies.
PUF: Mark, you're Regulatory Services Director. Talk about your role at the Commission.
Mark Vasconi: My role here is largely to manage the daily operations of a Staff that regulates water, solid waste, energy, conservation, telecom, and certain transportation areas. It's looking at the daily results and setting a strategic direction for what it is we think regulation should be doing to facilitate consumer and business interests in the state.
If there are changes in policy or in methodologies that we have to think about, it's part of my job to attempt to promote those and to promote certain types of experimenting, but also make certain that we are the most objective party in the room. Because everybody has an interest: consumers want lower rates, companies want more revenue. Somewhere in the middle is an objective result that is up to us to find and promote.