ATTORNEY General Eliot Spitzer, weighing in for the first time on the massive power blackout, is pointing a finger at Gov. Pataki and saying he may deserve some of the blame.
Spitzer, the front-running Democratic candidate for governor in 2006, told The Post that Republican Pataki’s energy policies over the past 8½ years failed to produce enough new power plants or badly needed upgrades to the state’s massive, but technologically backward, power grid.
“The deregulatory scheme of the last few years has led to a complete absence of strategic thinking and a failure to build either the necessary plants to produce energy or the capacity to move that energy around, the transmission requirements,” Spitzer said.
Asked if he held Pataki himself responsible for the policy failure, Spitzer, who chose his words carefully during an extended telephone interview, responded, “Absolutely.”
“We’ve also failed to properly integrate the New York grid with other regional transmission organizations,” continued Spitzer, who issued a state energy “action plan” in March 2001, which found that the “fundamental infrastructure” of transmission lines was “sorely lacking in New York.”
Spitzer also blasted the Pataki-controlled state Public Service Commission, which regulates electric utilities, for “being more interested in fending off the authority of others, at the regional and federal level, than in building the necessary structures” for New York’s power supply.
“Their argument was essentially, ‘Leave it to us and things would do fine.’ I think we’ve now seen that we did not do fine,” Spitzer continued.
While investigations are still under way into the cause of the massive blackout, many experts believe New York wasn’t prepared to handle the huge power fluctuations that apparently originated with an Ohio utility.
Pataki spokeswoman Lynn Rasic refused to respond to Spitzer’s charges, insisting, “This is no time for political finger-pointing.”
Political insiders expect Spitzer, who rarely attacked Pataki in the past, to become increasingly aggressive in his criticism of the governor in the coming months.
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The struggling state Conservative Party is seeking to turn Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, a one-time conservative who earlier this year approved the state’s biggest tax hike ever, into a symbol of all that’s wrong with the New York Republican Party.
About 1,000 party loyalists have been urged to organize letter-writing campaigns to tell Bruno and Senate Republicans “that we are fed up with their reckless and wasteful spending.”