In This Issue

SO LAST WEEK the California Public Utilities Commission agreed to give Pacific Gas and Electric Co. as much as another $8 billion of your money to get the poor, beleaguered utility out of bankruptcy. Never mind that PG&E's parent company in Maryland is making nice profits, and that there seems to be plenty of money to give bonuses to top execs who already make millions of dollars a year, and that a lot of the money is going to pay off creditors like Enron and Dynegy Power Marketing, who perhaps don't deserve to collect all the cash they're allegedly owed for selling electricity to California in the heat of the energy crisis.

And never mind that the private company you're going to be paying all the money to support can't even keep the lights on.

As far as we can tell, nobody knows exactly why a downtown transformer caught on fire last weekend, cutting power to a third of the city's households and businesses, in some cases for more than 24 hours. But I can tell you this: while Robert Glynn, PG&E's CEO, has been collecting his bonuses, PG&E has been cutting back on essential maintenance and letting its infrastructure crumble. As Bay Guardian controller Sandy Lange (who lost power for a day) quipped to me, perhaps the poor electric company execs couldn't afford to buy a couple of fire extinguishers for the substation. (They clearly couldn't afford to staff it – the place was empty when it caught on fire.)

You pay more money, you get less service. Happy holidays from PG&E.

As we note, it's hard to imagine a better case in favor of public power.

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In other news, there are only nine more business days left in the Brown administration – and, I suspect, a lot of the key documents that show what has been going on over the past eight years are already vanishing into the shredder. By the time Willie Brown actually leaves office, there may not be much left. So this is your last chance: Anyone who has fought with the mayor, or is interested in any of the numerous scandals and questionable decisions he and his staff have made, should immediately file a request under the Sunshine Ordinance for access to those documents. Get down to City Hall and grab the stuff while it's still around.