MIDWAY THROUGH A meeting of the San Francisco Local Agency Formation Commission Feb. 4, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, the panel's new chair, asked a key question of the city's power policy director. He wanted to know if the S.F. Public Utilities Commission sees itself as an advocate of community-choice aggregation, a program that would bring cheaper electricity to San Francisco and start moving the city out from under the thumb of the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. monopoly.

No, the PUC's Barbara Hale said – the agency wasn't an advocate of anything. The PUC staff could only carry out the policies passed by the Board of Supervisors.

Of course, Hale was missing a key point: community-choice aggregation has been city policy for more than eight months – and the whole point of the exchange was that the PUC has been dragging its feet, badly, failing to finish an implementation plan and putting the whole program at risk.

But there's a much larger problem here: the PUC is the agency that oversees the city's electricity program, and it ought to be at the forefront of the battle to bring public power to San Francisco. Instead, over and over again, the agency has ducked, stood on the sidelines – or actively interfered with that vision.

It starts at the top, with Mayor Gavin Newsom giving the PUC general manager job to Susan Leal, who was always a PG&E ally at city hall. Then Leal fired Ed Smeloff, the one person in the agency with the experience and credentials to push public power and the one senior person who actually seemed to want to do it. Now the PUC is far behind schedule on a critical step on the path to a sustainable-energy future for the city.

Community aggregation would allow San Francisco to directly buy electric power from wholesale generators, bypassing PG&E, and resell it to residential and commercial customers. Hale told LAFCO members her office will need another two months to finish the implementation plan. That's cutting it pretty close: because PG&E is in the process of negotiating its own long-term power contracts, the city has to get its aggregation plan finished and approved by the state by June, or it will risk losing its ability to make the program work economically.

This isn't a Herculean task. Paul Fenn, an energy activist and expert on aggregation, is putting together his own plan, in his spare time, and he showed up at the hearing with his two young children to push the issue. The PUC has a big, well-paid staff, and the agency has had since May to act on this. If Hale can't get it down promptly, by the first of April, LAFCO should just take Fenn's plan and run with it – and the supervisors should cut the PUC's budget to reflect its failure to do a basic job.

Meanwhile, the PUC's overall position needs to change, and the supervisors can help make that happen. The board should approve a resolution immediately establishing that public power is the city's top energy priority and informing the PUC that its job is to advocate for and promote public power – now, today, and from here forward.