An Analysis of Intervenor Compensation Programs Across Public Utility Commissions

Abstract

Utility regulation is a technical legal process that requires a significant level of expertise and resources to participate. To remedy the high barriers to entry, some states implement an intervenor compensation (IC) program – a program in which organizations are financially compensated for the direct costs (e.g., lawyers, expert witnesses) of participating in utility regulation proceedings. We sought to evaluate the effectiveness and impacts of IC programs, identify best practices, and determine whether these programs produce justice-centered outcomes. We provide state-specific analyses and thematic findings across the 5 states in which participants were interviewed. We investigated the barriers and facilitators in five states to gain different perspectives on a potential optimal design of an IC program and conducted 19 qualitative interviews with both recipients of the funding program as well as the staff who organize its disbursement.

Our key findings include: 1) Increased participation in utility proceedings is the goal of IC programs, which allows for other goals related to environmental, economic, and justice goals to be met; 2) Measurement of “effectiveness” of IC programs is unstandardized, but should consider metrics of participation (i.e. number of unique intervenors) and the return on investment to consumers in implementing IC; 3) More resources will help IC programs run more effectively through more funding, application support, gains in litigation experience over time, and facilitation of coalition building–all of which particularly help smaller organizations; 4) Administrative barriers were very common and take the form of complex application processes and complications with funding disbursement timelines. A comparison of program barriers and facilitators in Figure 3 illustrates the disparities in respondents’ perceptions of IC program implementation, with more than double the barriers than facilitators in administrative, resource, and legal categories. These findings lay a foundation for further research on the effectiveness of IC programs and encourage well-designed programs to be adopted in states where they have yet to be implemented.