In compliance with PU Code § 311(d), the ALJ prepared a proposed decision in this matter. The proposed decision was mailed to all parties on March 24, 1997. Twenty-three parties filed comments, and fifteen parties filed replies to comments. The Docket Office properly rejected reply comments by the Association of Bay Area Governments because that entity is not a party to the proceeding. Pursuant to Rule 77.6(c), Assigned Commissioner Richard A. Bilas and Commissioner Josiah L. Neeper mailed an alternate proposed decision to all parties on June 11, 1997. Fifteen parties filed comments, and five parties filed replies.
After considering these comments, on June 24, 1997, Assigned Commissioner Richard A. Bilas issued a ruling regarding alternate decision which requested further comments by July 1, 1997. On July 1, 1997 eleven parties filed comments in response to the Assigned Commissioner’s Ruling Regarding Alternate Decision. In addition, on July 1, 1997, the Commission’s Consumer Services Division submitted its settlement with PG&E to resolve the alleged Rule 1 violations.
All of the above-mentioned comments and the Rule 1 Settlement were considered and resulted in Assigned Commissioner Richard A. Bilas and Commissioner Josiah L. Neeper mailing a revised alternate proposed decision to all parties on July 2, 1997. Seven parties thereafter filed comments, and three parties filed replies. We have considered all of these comments in rendering this decision.
The revised alternate proposed decision forms the basis for this order. In the process of approving the Gas Accord we have reviewed and carefully considered the comments of the parties. We retain findings from the ALJ’s proposed decision regarding market power and conflict of interest, but we have reversed his recommendation to deny approval of the settlement.
Several members of NCPA, which is a Gas Accord signatory, comment that neither the Gas Accord nor the proposed decision allow municipal electric power producers access to the same gas transportation charges as PG&E’s UEG department. If adopted, this parity would give municipal utilities the same rate treatment as cogenerators. NCPA asks the Commission to rectify the omission. In a related matter, SoCalGas comments that the Gas Accord does not address transportation service priority for third party gas storage providers compared to priority for PG&E’s own storage service. SoCalGas asks the Commission to make it clear that utility and non-utility storage have the same priority. We decline to adopt the recommendations of NCPA and SoCalGas. These rate parity issues are beyond the scope of the record in the Line 401 general rate case.
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