Legal eagle eyes PGE deal

Attorney Ann Fisher dogs utility maneuvers on behalf of building owners

By Kristina Brenneman

The Portland Tribune, Jan 11, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

After leaked confidential documents disclosed last week that the Texas Pacific Group plans massive cuts after its purchase of Portland General Electric, the investment firm apparently has singled out Ann Fisher as the person responsible for the leak.

Texas Pacific attorney Lisa Rackner sent an e-mail to Fisher, the attorney for the Portland Building Owners and Managers Association, warning her that if the source of the disclosure is determined, Oregon Electric Co., the holding firm set up by Texas Pacific to attempt to buy PGE, “will pursue all available legal remedies, including requesting a formal investigation by the Oregon State Bar Association.”

The hard-nosed Fisher Ñ unexpectedly at the center of the PGE storm Ñ then e-mailed the letter to practically everyone she knows in the utility industry.

“She’s not going to take that lying down,” said the Public Power Council’s manager, Jerry Leone, who is a friend of Fisher’s.

Texas Pacific spokesman John Mangan said four parties were given the confidential documents on the PGE deal. Fisher, it turns out, was the only person of the four who received Rack-ner’s threatening letter.

Passing on confidential documents to reporters is not Fisher’s style, she said. “I tend to be blunt, not secretive.”

So who did it? She doesn’t know.

“Their intent is to distract,” she said of Texas Pacific’s reaction to the leaked documents. “That’s wrong. It makes it seem inappropriate to have the public see those documents. I thought they should have been released.”

As BOMA’s attorney, the 56-year-old Fisher has publicly taken the Oregon Public Utility Commission to task several times in the past month. First, for rushing ahead with its PGE review without waiting for results of a state investigation into Texas Pacific’s questionable investment in state pension funds.

Then, during hearings on the PGE sale, she challenged Public Utility Commissioner Ray Baum Ñ a former law school classmate Ñ over whether Texas Pacific’s power trumped that of state regulators.

And, notably, Fisher filed a legal motion with the PUC just a week ago demanding that the PUC release the confidential documents Ñ outlining staff and capital spending cuts at PGE Ñ that had been leaked to a Willamette Week reporter.

The PUC will consider the motion today.

“She has a willingness to be more confrontative than Oregon usually is,” said city Commissioner Erik Sten. “She’s the one who stepped out and said, ‘We should wait until this investigation is finished.’ She hasn’t shied away from really going after what needs to be done.”

Cuts are made confidential

Fisher’s client, BOMA, also was “offended” by the ad campaign mounted by Texas Pacific’s holding company, which said it would keep its headquarters here, said Bob Jenks, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board of Oregon.

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