Metro

Call it LIPAthetic

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ALBANY — A commission called by Gov. Cuomo to probe New York’s power companies after Hurricane Sandy yesterday recommended that the state pull the plug on the Long Island Power Authority.

The Moreland Act Commission’s report blasted LIPA for its inept response to the storm and called for replacing it with a privately owned utility subject to closer scrutiny by the Public Service Commission.

And the commission called for giving the PSC the power to levy much stiffer fines on utilities and yank their licenses.

“We’re basically recommending putting the PSC on steroids,” said commission member Benjamin Lawsky, also Cuomo’s superintendent of financial services.

Lawsky called LIPA’s management “fundamentally dysfunctional.”

Cuomo liked what he heard from the commission.

“PSC is not an effective regulator,” he said. “It has to be fundamentally changed.”

“To truly regulate” utilities, he added, “I believe you have to be able to terminate the relationship; otherwise you have no ultimate sanction.”

Cuomo hinted he’ll recommend legislation to revamp the 106-year-old PSC and dismantle LIPA — a state-controlled authority that owns Long Island power lines but doesn’t supply the power — as part of his State of the State speech tomorrow.

Cuomo rejected suggestions he was at fault for failing to make effective appointments to LIPA during his two years in office.

“LIPA was flawed from inception; there was nothing you could do with the existing structure — whether it had 10 people on the board or 14 people on the board,” he said, noting it was created to manage debt from the Shoreham nuclear power plant.

Asked whether he made that point when his father, former Gov. Mario Cuomo, created LIPA, he deadpanned, “We didn’t talk about these things at home.”