Toronto City Council is proposing significant changes to the Board of Directors at Toronto Hydro. Most prominently, Council is proposing the replacement of Chair Clare Copeland by David Williams. Here is the proposal of Council.

As reported here, Copeland directly associated himself with the threats, bully tactics, and misleading propaganda about rates that was the core of CEO Anthony Haines’ regulatory strategy.

From an earlier directorship at Toronto Hydro, Williams knew the utility before it began its outages-are-assets strategy to boost rates. He knew the utility from a time when “smart grid” meant getting best value from aging assets.

An early signal from the next Toronto Hydro chair that would restore some public confidence toward the utility would be for the utility to restructure its corporate performance objectives so that the performance objectives reflected improved performance – such as sticking to an asset management plan and reducing outage durations. Another measure would be to publish the performance objectives in advance. Another action the next chair might take is to show up at Thorncliffe Park on Saturday at Councillor Parker’s event so the chair can explain directly to residents the cause of the outage and the plan is to improve reliability.