Highest paid public employee in Georgia?

Come on, guess! You’re right: it’s a football coach. UGA football coaching staff get even more compensation than Paul Bowers, CEO of Georgia Power, or Thomas A. Fanning, CEO of the Southern Company, let alone any insignificant college president or elected official.

If I’m reading the ESPN database right, UGA coaches get around $14 million a year, while Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers gets only $5.5 million compensation and Southern Company CEO Thomas A. Fanning gets only $13 million. So maybe I’ve been unfairly griping about electric utility executive compensation. Maybe if we the ratepayers and shareholders and voters insisted on raising their pay to match football coaches, maybe we’d get real safety and return on investment instead of feeble excuses for cost overruns. Maybe Georgia Power and Southern Company would even have a chance of winning the Super Bowl of disruptive distributed solar power!

Sure, I know Bowers and Fanning are not public employees. But Georgia Power is a public utility, regulated by the Georgia Public Service Commission, which isn’t doing much else to get either company to kick their old-style big baseload capacity mainline addiction and get on with distributed solar and wind. Maybe GA PSC should insist on raising their pay!

-jsq