Big PG&E lies
The truth about the utility's P.R. campaign against public power.

By Rachel Brahinsky

File this under "strictly shameless": A flyer sent out to voters on the city's conservative west side, and designed like a cigarette health warning, cautions that public power Proposition D "may be hazardous to our City's health." Put together by Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s front group San Franciscans Against the Blank Check, the campaign mailer is a cynical twist on the effort by public power advocates to use Prop. D to help close the polluting power plants on the city's east side, long believed to be poisoning low-income San Franciscans of color. These communities have experienced health problems such as asthma, cancer, and heart disease, all of which may be related to pollution from two nearby plants.

The mailer is just one plank in the utility's campaign (managed by P.R. firm Solem and Associates) to derail the public power effort. Below we dismantle two of the biggest lies of the campaign so far, which can be found on the group's Web site, www.noblankcheck.org.

Lie number one: PG&E says Prop. D won't help shut down the Hunters Point power plant. When Sups. Sophie Maxwell and Tom Ammiano wrote Prop. D, one of their primary goals was to close PG&E's aging and polluting Hunters Point power plant. Yet PG&E and its representatives are claiming that Prop. D won't help the city shutter the plant. They argue that the Independent System Operator, a state agency, has the final say over the plant's future and that a local ballot initiative could not influence its fate. That's true: the plant remains open – four years after Mayor Willie Brown signed an agreement that was supposed to shut it down – because the ISO says that until there are new energy resources in place, we need the plant for system reliability.

But PG&E hasn't built any new power plants, and the city hasn't had the funds or the policy directive it would need to move forward on its own. PG&E plans to build a new transmission line, which will help, but there's no guarantee it will complete this project soon enough.

The quickest way to close the plant, according to city power managers, is to use a multilayered approach: energy efficiency and new (cleaner and smaller) power plants, along with a new transmission line. Prop. D can fund all of these and would give the city a voter mandate to push forward with creating alternatives to the poison of the old power plant.

Lie number two: PG&E says a public San Francisco power utility won't have cheaper rates than PG&E. PG&E's supporters like to remind voters how the energy crisis hit the Lassen Municipal Utility District, the state's newest public power agency. It's true: LMUD made several bad decisions and was forced to buy electricity on the open market during the height of the energy crisis. Rates soared 48 percent, prompting a consumer revolt in which four members of LMUD's board of directors were recalled. (PG&E's front group claims Lassen's rates went up 70 percent. This is an outright lie.)

Even with the jump in rates, Lassen's prices remained lower than PG&E's, and this winter the utility brought rates back down 20 percent. Today a Lassen residential consumer using 500 kwh of power each month pays $61; that same customer in San Francisco would pay PG&E $74.55.

Meanwhile the 2,009 public power agencies nationwide charge an average of 20 percent less than private power companies, according to Sacramento-based energy consulting firm R.W. Beck. PG&E claims that a new utility would not achieve those savings – but that's where Lassen is instructive. Even LMUD, a victim of the energy crisis, charges far less than PG&E.

Also key: when rates go up, consumers are able to respond by replacing the board and can hold the general manager (who is a public official) accountable. When PG&E announced its 40 percent rate hike last year, consumers had no recourse. There's no way to recall the PG&E board. Now in bankruptcy court, PG&E is pushing to keep rates artificially high for the next decade to pad corporate profits. The only real way to recall PG&E is to pass Prop. D.

For more information on Prop. D go to www.sfbg.com or www.powertothepeople.org. For more on public power go to www.appanet.org. The Bay Guardian, Bay Guardian editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann, and associate publisher Jean Dibble are contributors to the Yes on D campaign. E-mail Rachel Brahinsky at rachel@sfbg.com.