Arkansas Public Service Commission Chair Doyle Webb voted in November to approve a $142 million settlement proposed by Entergy that gave its 730,000 Arkansas ratepayers an average $78 rebate this month on their July electric bills.
Earlier this year, Webb’s wife, Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Barbara Webb, reported getting campaign contributions of $2,000 from ENPAC Arkansas, Entergy’s political action committee. She received $8,500 in donations from Entergy employees.
Coincidence? That wasn’t the conclusion of Saline County politician Stephanie Johnson, who filed a complaint against Doyle Webb with the Arkansas Ethics Commission.
She accused Webb of having a “cozy relationship” with Entergy and told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that she would “like to see him removed from his position.”
The settlement compensates Entergy ratepayers for years of questionable mismanagement at Entergy’s Grand Gulf nuclear power plant in Mississippi.
Doyle Webb was hardly the only regulator to see the settlement as worthy, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ratified the deal in March.
It’s true that the Public Service Commission had rejected the deal in August 2022. At that time, Ted Thomas was PSC chair and Kimberly O’Guinn was on the panel. Those two left the agency in September 2022 and January 2023, respectively. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders appointed Webb as PSC chairman in January.
Johnson, a Republican justice of the peace-elect, has been involved in a feud with Doyle Webb, a former state GOP chairman, over Republican Party leadership in Saline County.
Webb serves on the board of a nonprofit, Republican Party of Saline County Inc., which evicted the Saline County Republican Committee from its Benton headquarters on July 2.
The nonprofit cited the committee’s vote of no-confidence in U.S. Sens. Tom Cotton and John Boozman, as well as 2nd District U.S. Rep. French Hill, all Republicans. But the evicted panel called the action “part of a multi-step plan by Mr. Webb to tarnish the strong reputation of the Saline County Republican Committee.”
Background: Barbara Webb ran up a $50,000 debt last year in her failed bid to become Arkansas’ chief justice. Doyle Webb said former state Senate colleague Tom Kennedy, an Entergy executive, approached him this year about ways to defray some of the debt.
Entergy noted it contributed to Justice Webb’s campaign for associate justice in 2000, before Doyle Webb joined the PSC.
Kacee Kirschvink, communications manager for Entergy Arkansas, said the complaint against Webb is “baseless and without merit.” She added that “politically motivated allegations” like the complaint “ignore the obvious fact that the decision to settle in Arkansas was not Chairman Webb’s alone, but rather required a majority of the three ASPC commissioners.”
The FERC “recognized the settlement as fair, reasonable and in the public interest for Entergy Arkansas customers and our company,” she added. The deal “benefits customers not only through the SERI refunds, but also through the future rate reduction provided for by the settlement, not to mention the costs of continued litigation … .” SERI refers to System Energy Resources Inc., the subsidiary that owns Grand Gulf.
She said Entergy Arkansas has long supported candidates that it respects. It particularly favors candidates who support business interests, including Barbara Webb. Some Entergy team members have known her “for over 30 years, including when she was elected as one of the state’s first female prosecuting attorneys in 1997,” Kirschvink said.
“Our employees would not have made any contributions if we perceived any ethics issues,” Kirschvink said, adding that the donations were unrelated to any matter before the PSC. “However, based on our long history of supporting candidates, we recognized that some uninformed individuals might, for other politically motivated reasons, attempt to rely upon the contributions to question, criticize, or raise baseless claims regarding Chairman Webb or Entergy Arkansas.”
Sign up for Daily E-news
