Jeff Turnage and two others filed a petition with the Georgia Public Service Commission Commission, requesting that body to direct Georgia Power Company Georgia Power to halt the construction of an electrical substation near their residential properties. The Commission dismissed that petition for lack of jurisdiction, finding that the neighboring property owners did not show that, in this proceeding, the exercise of authority over the siting of a particular substation bears a rational relationship to the accomplishment of the purposes which the Commission was created to serve. The Commission further noted that, even if itwere to determine that it possessed jurisdiction to prohibit Georgia Power from locating a substation at the chosen site, it is not clear what specific criteria the Commission would follow for taking such action. There are no Commission rules or prior decisions to guide any decision it might be called upon to make regarding the appropriateness of any particular site. . . . The Commission has no regulations governing the siting of substations.Turnage then filed a petition for judicial review and for a writ of mandamus against the Public Service Commission and its commissioners in their official capacities PSC, requesting the trial court to require the PSC to accept jurisdiction, to establish rules for the siting of substations, and to schedule a substantive hearing to review the siting of the particular substation at issue. Georgia Power was allowed to intervene. The trial court denied the petition for judicial review, finding that Turnage was not an “aggrieved person” under OCGA § 50-13-19 a, because he merely alleged that his property is in the vicinity of the substation and he proffered no evidence of any specific damage unique to his property. In the same order, however, the trial court granted the mandamus petition, “refusing to countenance the counterintuitive proposition that there is no agency with the authority to make zoning-like decisions or provide any governmental review with regard to the siting of substations” or other complex construction projects, and finding that City of Buford v. Ga. Power Co. , 276 Ga. 590 581 SE2d 16 2003 “expressly vests the PSC with that power and thus holds that the PSC has a clear public duty to hear Turnage’s case.” Accordingly, the trial court ordered the PSC to take jurisdiction of this matter, but stated that it did “not presume to instruct the PSC on what specific standards to apply when presiding over this case, other than to apply standards that would ensure a fair and meaningful conclusion of the issues involved.” The PSC appeals from this order in Case Number S08A1604, and Georgia Power appeals in Case Number S08A1606. 1. The motion to dismiss this case as moot and vacate the trial court’s order, which the PSC filed in this Court during the pendency of these appeals, is hereby denied.
2. Public utilities are generally granted a protected status with respect to zoning restrictions because of the greater public welfare which utilities serve and becausetheir facilities must often be located in areas which would otherwise not be the most suitable from the standpoint of customary zoning criteria. . . . Electric substations . . . must often be located in residential zones in order to properly provide service, even though they might tend to adversely affect property values or change the character of a neighborhood.4 Edward H. Ziegler, Jr., Rathkopf’s The Law of Zoning and Planning § 78:2 2008.
