States require such participation, e.g. in the form of myriad document filings. Ratepayer revenue may be a utility's only revenue. How should such a utility pay its employees who produce filings for the state PUC?
I'm not an expert in this, but roughly speaking the way utility rate regulation works is that rates are set at a level that gives the utility a certain return on capital. (roc = profit/equity = (revenue - expenses) / equity).
What they probably want is for political spending to be excluded from the expenses section of that formula for the purposes of the rate setting calculation. (They would still appear there in GAAP financial statements.)
So the utility would pay those expenses by accepting reduced profits.
Do you expect that shareholders should run a permanent loss on the business?
Have a firm loan the utility the costs and recover them from the dividend payments.
“Recovering from the dividend” is just another way of saying you are using revenues to pay for something.
Paying a dividend out and then taking part back is not only inefficient but would still violate any prohibition to spend revenue on something.
If you wanted to do this, it’s just the same as reducing the dividend by some amount and the paying that amount out to a different expense.
Also, dividends are post tax so this is super inefficient in that you wouldn’t be able to deduct the expense if wanted to pay out as dividend and then have shareholders pay the expense.