FINALLY, MORE than 30 years after public power advocates in San Francisco started demanding that the city do a serious, credible study on public power and energy options, a consultant to the Local Agency Formation Commission has released a preliminary report that ought to spur a successful drive to boot Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and create a municipal power agency.

The report, by R.W. Beck, a nationally known utility consulting firm, is vague in parts and far from comprehensive. It relies on some flawed assumptions that are favorable to PG&E, and it provides no financial analysis of how public power would work. But it does offer two strong – and historic – conclusions that need to drive discussions on the shape of a November ballot measure.

The report warns that PG&E has put the city at risk of further supply interruptions, and it states that San Francisco residents and businesses would likely save 20 percent on their power bills under a municipal utility. That's a conservative number – the report compares San Francisco to other utilities that have to buy most of their power from PG&E. San Francisco will get some from its own Hetch Hetchy hydropower dam and is likely to build its own renewable energy-generating systems, which in the long run will drop costs even lower.

More important, from a policy standpoint, is the report's clear message that San Francisco should move toward owning its own transmission and distribution system. That's one of the biggest issues in the debate over Sup. Tom Ammiano's charter amendment, which was introduced to the Board of Supervisors June 17 and would limit the ability of a city power agency to buy out PG&E's system. Instead, the Ammiano measure promotes alternatives like community aggregation, a system under which the city would sell power over PG&E's lines. That would leave the private utility in control of the city's power infrastructure. It would also limit the city's ability to reduce power rates, increase reliability, and control its own energy future.

Ammiano argues that by stopping short of pushing a takeover of PG&E's system, he'll be able to get broader political support for the charter amendment. But he won't get any support from PG&E: the utility has already announced it will campaign against the measure, guaranteeing that the opposition will be armed with millions of dollars in utility money. And if PG&E is against it, there's a good chance the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 1245 – the union representing PG&E workers – will also oppose the measure and will push the San Francisco Labor Council not to support it (see "High-Voltage Debate," 6/12/02). And San Francisco Planning and Urban Research, a group whose support Ammiano has courted, demonstrated its lack of interest in promoting public power this week: a major SPUR forum on the city's energy future, featuring nationally known speakers such as Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, had not a single person on the roster who was promoting public power. (The only possible exception, Ed Smeloff, who is Mayor Willie Brown's chief energy advisor, won't even commit to supporting Ammiano's current measure.)

On the other hand, Ammiano may find the grassroots excitement generated by last year's public power campaigns is missing this time around. Frankly, a lot of public power advocates aren't that enthused about the new measure. Ammiano needs to explain how he plans to campaign this fall to pass a plan that may not have strong support from any constituent group in the city – and that will have heavy-duty, well-funded opposition from PG&E.

The most obvious answer: the supervisors should amend the proposal to include stronger language allowing the new power agency to issue revenue bonds for a PG&E takeover if a credible study shows that it makes financial sense. (The new agency should also be overseen by an elected, not appointed, board, with the independence and accountability to take on a bitter fight against PG&E.) The supervisors should look at Ammiano's measure as a starting point – one that needs to go further if it's going to be the master plan for a long-term effort to do what the city needed to do for most of the past century: take back the local energy system from PG&E.