Looking through our archives, I spotted the NARUC's Membership Directory of July 2016, published around three and a half years ago. And then I brought out a copy of NARUC's latest Membership Directory, published in time for the recent NARUC Winter Policy Summit. And I compared the commissioners as of July 2016 — at the principal commissions of the fifty states and the District of Columbia — and those as of February 2020.
I found that of the two hundred and one commissioner positions, a hundred and one of them were filled by new commissioners not in their positions in July 2016. That comes to a fifty percent turnover in the three and a half year period.
Six of these fifty-one state commissions had no turnover. That is, all twenty commissioners at the commissions of Alabama, Delaware, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Utah have been in their positions going back to the summer of 2016 or before.
At the other extreme, five of the fifty-one commissions had a complete turnover. That is, all fifteen commissioners at the commissions of Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Texas and Wyoming have started in their positions sometime in the last three and a half years.
And seventeen of the fifty-one commissions had a near-complete turnover with just a single commissioner at each regulatory body from three and a half years ago. These seventeen commissions - of Arizona, Arkansas, California, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island and West Virginia - have a total of forty-six new commissioners and only seventeen veteran commissioners serving since the summer of 2016 or before.
Of the hundred and one new commissioners, forty-two of them are women and fifty-nine are men. So forty-two percent of the new commissioners are women and fifty-eight percent are men.