Community voltage
Activists push city hall on energy policy

By Rachel Brahinsky

Environmental justice and public power advocates last week renewed aggressive campaigns to push city hall to radically rethink its energy policy.

Environmental groups – including the Bayview Hunters Point Advocates, Communities for a Better Environment, Literacy for Environmental Justice, the San Francisco Community Power Cooperative, and Greenaction – unveiled a green power-based community energy plan at a May 1 press conference on the steps of City Hall. The plan revived the call for the city to force Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to close its aging Hunters Point power plant.

Meanwhile, San Franciscans for Public Power, a group working with Sup. Tom Ammiano to draft a public power ballot initiative for November, called for an elected agency to oversee the city's water and power system. The group has also endorsed the principles of the environmental justice plan.

The community energy proposal was written in an effort to influence the scope of the city's official energy plan, which will be released June 3. It suggests the city mandate energy conservation and use the most renewable power possible, to protect residents' health.

"We deserve to breathe clean air," Potrero Hill resident Marcia Sims said at the City Hall press conference. "There are so many kids sick in our community. But we don't want treatment. We want a solution." Sims lives within two miles of both of the city's two fossil fuel-fired power plants.

At a meeting of San Franciscans for Public Power, also held May 1, the group indicated through an informal poll its intent to design a new public power ballot measure for the fall that has the stated goal of eventually acquiring PG&E's system. The initiative should create an independent water and power agency, run by an elected board, group members agree.

Those suggestions will likely be debated at hearings on the initiative, expected to begin in late June.

There was strong sentiment among the public power advocates that limiting pollution in Sims's part of town should be one of the goals of the coalition. "Everything that members of the community plan point to, we want to see in a public power initiative," spokesperson Ross Mirkarimi said.

Read the coalition's proposal at www.greenaction.org/greenenergy/plan0402.shtml. Ammiano and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission power policy manager Ed Smeloff will discuss public power before the San Francisco Local Agency Formation Commission Fri/10, 2 p.m., City Hall, Room 263, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, S.F. (415) 554-7702. To tell Ammiano what you think a new public power initiative should look like, call (415) 554-5144 or e-mail tom_ammiano@ci.sf.ca.us. E-mail Rachel Brahinsky at rachel@sfbg.com.