Ever since the cargo ship Cosco Busan sideswiped the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge last month, spilling 58,000 gallons of fuel oil into the bay, members of Congress and state legislators have been clamoring for investigations of just about everybody responsible for the spill and its cleanup.

The ship’s owners and crew, the U.S. Coast Guard and the state agency in charge of preventing oil spills and cleaning them up have all come under intense scrutiny. But the one party that has all but escaped notice from the politicians is the one most responsible: the pilot who guided the ship into the bridge support on that foggy November morning.

That pilot — John Cota — is part of a state-sanctioned system that grants a monopoly to a politically powerful association of 60 sea captains who earn half-million-dollar annual salaries and whose oversight board comprises members appointed by the governor.

 Cota last week was accused of misconduct by the Board of Pilot Commissioners for the Bays of San Francisco, San Pablo and Suisun. The board’s investigators said Cota never should have led the ship into the bay because visibility was too low. They also said the ship was moving too fast and that Cota failed to use a tugboat, the Coast Guard or the ship’s lookout to avoid hitting the bridge.

The pilots’ system is as old as the state itself, having been created by the first Legislature in 1850. Under this arrangement, 60 pilots who are partners in the San Francisco Bar Pilots Association are, in most cases, the only ones who can legally guide a ship into and out of the harbor.

The board operates mostly in obscurity, its business of interest primarily the pilots and the shipping industry, which pays the pilots’ salaries and for their boats, equipment and training through charges set by the Legislature. Earlier this year, Assemblyman Juan Arambula, D- Fresno, chairman of a legislative committee with responsibility for the commission’s budget, asked the board for information about its business practices and accountability.

In a polite but terse reply, the board’s executive director, Capt. P.A. Maloney, pretty much told Arambula to mind his own business.

“The board,” Maloney wrote, “self-audits.”

In light of the recent accident, Arambula thinks the Legislature ought to take a closer look at the operation.

It would certainly be worth comparing the San Francisco system to the way the same job is done in Southern California. In Los Angeles, the harbor pilots are city employees overseen by the port. In Long Beach, they are employees of a private firm that contracts with the shippers. In both places, the pilots earn about half of what they get in the Bay Area.

Arambula said he would “rather not speculate” about why the Legislature seems so disinterested in the pilot and the regulatory board, but it might have something to do with the outsized influence of the pilots association.

In 2003, for example, the group donated $4,000 to the campaign to stop the recall of then-Gov. Gray Davis and $5,000 to the campaign of Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, who was running to replace Davis in case the voters ousted him. After the recall won and Bustamante lost to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the group switched sides, donating $21,200 — the maximum allowed by law — to the new governor’s campaign committee less than two weeks after he took office.

Cota, like his colleagues, was a regular donor. Since Cota made the decisions that led to the accident, and the Board of Pilot Commissioners is the state agency responsible for the performance of Cota and his colleagues, shouldn’t their actions before and during the incident be of just as much interest to the Legislature as the performance of the people called upon to clean up the mess?

(Weintraub writes for the Sacramento Bee.)