The peakers are coming
Needed: a real public hearing, an open process, an EIR, and binding assurances for closure of the PG&E and Mirant plants

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Philip De Andrade, the Paul Revere of Potrero Hill, flashed the SOS by e-mail from his Goat Hill Pizza restaurant on the top of the hill: The peakers are coming, the peakers are coming. And so, on the evening of Aug. 28, I hustled over to the Potrero Neighborhood House to attend one of the most annoying neighborhood meetings in my 38 years of covering local politics as editor of the Bay Guardian.

It was my first public meeting on Potrero Hill, where the Bay Guardian moved its offices last year, and I learned just how contemptuously city hall treats this neighborhood – and every person who lives and works with the toxic effects of the two dirty Mirant and Pacific Gas and Electric power plants.

The city eight months ago had secretly negotiated a deal to acquire four fossil-burning plants, then hired a former Calpine and PG&E engineer to develop them. The fix had been in for months to slam three and possibly four peakers into the Potrero waterfront, but only now was the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission coming to Potrero and letting the locals in on the big secret.

This is no way to do public business, by stiffing the community and refusing to involve it early on in the decision-making process. The hearing was months late and scheduled at a bad time before the Labor Day weekend, with little advance public notice, little time to assess the SFPUC's data, ridiculous deadlines, a restricted public-comment format (one question permitted, two minutes per speaker, with many speakers getting cut off rudely in mid-sentence), and a dog and pony show by energy czar Ed Smeloff that only confirmed the main point: the peakers are being fast-tracked and rammed into your neighborhood, no alternatives, like it or lump it, you rubes.

Significantly, there were no elected officials at the meeting. The district supervisor Sophie Maxwell was conspicuously absent (her aide came, read a cop-out statement, and left early). No City Attorney Dennis Herrera (who lives in Dogpatch and negotiated the deal). No state senator John Burton (who lives on the hill and ought to be making the kind of calls he made to stop the Hastings Law School expansion). No supervisors, no mayor, no district attorney, no mayoral or district attorney candidates, and no elected or appointed officials yelling bloody murder or even uttering a critical peep before, during, or after. Why?

Smeloff shouldn't hold one more neighborhood meeting without – at minimum – having in hand a notice for a real full-scale public hearing before the Board of Supervisors, the SFPUC, or the Local Agency Formation Commission.

Meanwhile, neighborhood and public power activists must keep the pressure on: call on all elected officials, mayoral candidates, and SFPUC commissioners to halt this peaker steamroller and demand a real public hearing, an open and democratic process, a budget analyst's report, a complete and comprehensive environmental-impact report, and binding assurances that the PG&E and Mirant plants will be closed.

Sadly, this mess only demonstrates once again how wrong city hall has been all these years in allowing PG&E to monopolize city energy policy and keep it from building a real public power authority in accordance with the federal Raker Act. And so the peaker squad again raises the key questions: Why must the neighborhood and the people being poisoned exclusively bear the brunt of the city's enduring mistakes? Why doesn't city hall cop to these mistakes? Why won't city hall let the residents talk back properly and defend themselves? The answer, alas, is that PG&E and Mirant in effect still call the shots at city hall.

E-mail Bruce B. Brugmann