Paul L. Gioia, a former apprentice electrician who for five years oversaw New York State’s utility companies as they struggled to cope with the public’s growing concerns over nuclear power plants and consumer complaints about their costs, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Loudonville, N.Y. He was 81.
The cause of his death, in a hamlet just north of the state capital in Albany, was cardiac arrhythmia, Clarence J. Sundram, a longtime friend and former colleague in state government, said.
Mr. Gioia (pronounced JOY-ya) was an apolitical lawyer when he was appointed chairman of the Public Service Commission by Gov. Hugh L. Carey in 1981.
“As the P.S.C. chairman, he stood up for the duty of quasi-judicial officers to make their judgments independent of political influences,” Mr. Sundram said. “He had a strong sense of right and wrong and the courage to act on his convictions even when he knew it could cost him his job.”
But Mr. Gioia’s independence ran afoul of Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, Mr. Carey’s successor and a fellow Democrat.
In August 1986, a gubernatorial election year, Mr. Cuomo ousted Mr. Gioia, the first time in a half-century that a governor had removed a chairman of the commission, whose seven members regulate operations, rates and financing for the state’s electric, gas, steam, telephone and water supply corporations. The chairman has only one vote, but typically sets the commission’s agenda.
The governor argued that the commission was favoring utilities over consumers and challenged the panel’s findings that would have allowed billions of dollars in construction costs for two new nuclear power plants — Shoreham on Long Island’s North Shore and Nine Mile Point 2 in upstate Oswego — to be passed on to ratepayers.
The commission imposed a spending cap on the upstate plant (which began regular operations in 1988, 13 years after construction started), and imposed a $1.35 billion penalty on the Long Island Lighting Company in 1985 for mismanaging the building of the Shoreham plant.
Mr. Gioia said he had been seeking to reconcile customers’ concerns over safety and their growing utility bills resulting from cost overruns, while keeping the power companies solvent, at least temporarily.
Safety concerns were stoked by the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor near Middletown, Pa., in 1979. According to federal officials, the accident resulted in small radioactive releases but generated a backlash against nuclear plants and sweeping changes in the protocols for emergency responses.
A chief concern about the Shoreham plant on Long Island was the lack of adequate evacuation strategies. Those concerns were exacerbated in 1986 by the meltdown of the No. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant in Ukraine, which resulted in the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.
Shoreham was completed after vastly surpassing its projected budget, but it never began regular operations. The Long Island Lighting Company, which built the plant and had been a target of public outrage for decades, was ultimately replaced in 1998 by a state agency, the Long Island Power Authority, which immediately cut rates.
“It was Mario’s view that the P.S.C. needed to become more aggressive on dismantling Lilco and stopping Shoreham,” said Tonio Burgos, who was secretary to the governor. “However, Mario had great respect and admiration for Paul as a lawyer and a good public servant.”
Paul Leonard Gioia was born on July 26, 1942, in Brooklyn to Peter and Mary (Santoro) Gioia. His father was an electrician while his mother managed the household.
After graduating from Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, he received a bachelor’s degree in 1962 from Fordham University on a union scholarship and apprenticed summers as an electrician. He earned a law degree from the Cornell University Law School in 1965 (and a master’s degree in philosophy from Fordham in 2022).
Mr. Gioia served on an icebreaker in the Coast Guard, worked as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan and as a special assistant to U.S. Senator Jacob K. Javits, a New York Republican. He went on to be named an assistant counsel to two Republican governors of New York, Nelson A. Rockefeller and Malcolm Wilson. To his surprise, he was retained by Mr. Carey, a Democrat, in the counsel’s office, which the incoming governor had named Judah Gribetz to lead.
In 1976, Mr. Gribetz and Mr. Gioia were instrumental in Mr. Carey’s eventually successful effort to oust Maurice Nadjari, an aggressive special state anti-corruption prosecutor, who by then was widely regarded as more heedless than heroic.
After leaving the Public Service Commission when his term as a commissioner expired, Mr. Gioia joined an international law firm, which became known as Dewey & LeBoeuf. He helped establish the New York Independent System Operator in 1997 to oversee the newly deregulated wholesale electricity generating market and the maintenance of high-voltage transmission systems.
His wife, Patricia, died in 2016. He is survived by a brother, Salvatore Gioia Sr.