A former environmental lawyer takes the controls at $6.9-billion-a-year utility.

A former environmental lawyer takes the controls at $6.9-billion-a-year public utility

Leadership of Los Angeles' seventh-largest public company shifts Oct. 1, as former environmental lawyer and utility regulator John Bryson becomes chairman and chief executive of SCECorp., and Michael Peevey is elevated to president.

They fill the posts vacated by Howard Allen, who turns 65 this month and retires. He will continue advising the company on its pending merger plan with San Diego Gas & Electric Co. If approved by regulators, it would create the nation's largest utility, with an estimated $9 billion in revenues and 5 million customers.

In an interview with the Business Journal, Bryson, 47, said he will "wholeheartedly endorse" Allen's philosophy of avoiding risky diversification. "We have to stick to our knitting," said the Yale Law School graduate, mentioning hotel and resort management as side endeavors that have brought losses to other ambitious utilities. Leading the $6.9 billion (revenues) holding company for the Southern California Edison Co. utility, he wants to "build our young, but successful, non-utility businesses both nationally and

internationally," but never straying far from the power-generation field.

When asked how his priorities would differ from Allen, Bryson pointed abroad. "The worldwide movement toward market economies and the trend to privatize" create keen opportunities for its non-utility Mission Energy Co. subsidiary. It is building a 1,000-megawatt gas-fired plant in Wales to sell juice to the newly privatized electric market in the United Kingdom.

The Portland native, with perhaps an untraditional background for a utility chief, began his career as a staff lawyer and co-founder of the activist National Resources Defense Council. The litigious environmental-protection group, which periodically crosses swords with utilities nationwide, was launched, in part, fighting a hydroelectric plant by the Hudson River to save a scenic forest.

Two years as a private attorney in Portland and another two teaching at Stanford Law School were followed by the chairmanship of California's Water Resources Control Board. That spot was earned, in part, by his previous law work for the City of Sacramento and citizen groups battling to save the American River from depletion by the proposed Auburn Dam.

From 1979 to 1982 he was president of the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates Edison.

After two years with San Francisco law firm Morrison & Foerster, he joined the utility in 1984, as did executive VP Peevey, SCECorp.'s new president.

Peevey, 52, was a co-founder and then president for 11 years of the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance before joining the utility in 1984.

Bryson is not the youngest executive to lead Edison. In 1901, John B. Miller, 31, was named president (there was no chief executive post) of the company's predecessor, Edison Electric Co.

PHOTO : Bryson: New SCECorp. chairman, CEO