6. Overall Benefits of Participation

In D.98-04-059, the Commission adopted a requirement that a customer demonstrate that its participation was "productive," as that term is used in § 1801.3, where the Legislature provided guidance on program administration. (See D.98-04-059, mimeo. at 31-33, and Finding of Fact 42.) D.98-04-059 explained that participation must be productive in the sense that the costs of participation should bear a reasonable relationship to the benefits realized through such participation. D.98-04-059 directed customers to demonstrate productivity by assigning a reasonable dollar value to the benefits of their participation to ratepayers. This exercise assists us in determining the reasonableness of the request and in avoiding unproductive participation.

However, the general requirement of productivity has to be interpreted within the confines of a particular proceeding. Not all proceedings lend themselves readily to quantification of their benefits. In particular, proceedings such as this one, consisting primarily of exploration of alternative policy ideas, yield benefits that are difficult to quantify. Not surprisingly, each of the intervenors has found it impossible to put a dollar figure on the benefits it claims to have engendered through its participation. Accordingly, in trying to value the benefits associated with an intervenor's participation, we have primarily looked at how many of an intervenor's positions we ultimately adopted; to what extent an intervenor's positions were also urged by others; and whether an intervenor's presentation gave us new insights.

We also need to take into account the Legislature's determination, expressed in the various statutes that address the undergrounding issue, that this is an important matter that should have major resources devoted to it. While the utilities have argued that undergrounding is merely an aesthetic issue, we note that the ubiquitous presence of poles and wires has significant environmental impacts including use of right-of-way corridors and visual obstruction. Further, undergrounding receives substantial attention from planning agencies and courts. Formulating better policies will ultimately save time and money in those venues. For these reasons, we believe it is appropriate to compensate the intervenors to some degree for their participation in the workshops, even though they cannot assign a specific benefit to each hour of time spent there.

Much of the time in the workshops was spent discussing issues that we ultimately chose to defer to our later rulemaking proceeding. The intervenors participated in good faith in those discussions and deserve to have their contributions recognized. However, we believe the later rulemaking proceeding is the appropriate venue to consider compensation requests that relate to deferred topics, and we have adjusted the awards in this proceeding accordingly.

In summary, the awards we make today reflect evaluations of contributions to the decision and the workshops, as well as deferrals of compensation requests related to issues that are the subject of future rulemaking.